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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



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LIBRARY OP CONGRESS. 

Cha P« Copyright No. 

UNITED SXATES OF AMERICA. 



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COURTESY OF NORTHFIELD ECHOES.' 



Hnbrew fll>urra\> Jj?ear Book 



COMPILED BY 

M. J. SHEPPERSON 



ADDRHSS : 

'WATCHWORD AND TRUTH'' 
Box 5326. Boston, Mass. 



The Library 
of Congress 



T5V M-* iz 



WASHINGTON 



27904 



Copyrighted 1899 

by 

Mary Johnson Shepperson. 



TWO COPIES R£C-tV£0. 




) 1899 






To Rev* Andrew Murray, 

one of my first teachers, 

who has shown me the 

value of -prayer 

and 

the blessedness of abiding 

in Christ. 



PRAYER. 

Lord teach us how to pray. (Lukeii :i). My soul 
is silent unto God. (Psalm 62:1). Upon Thee do 
I wait all the day. (Psalm 25:5). Keep us abiding 
in Christ (John 15:7), and let His Word dwell in 
us richly (Col. 3:10)., that we may be perfect and 
fully assured in all Thy will. (Col. 4:12). Direct our 
hearts into the patience of Christ. (2 Thess. 3:5). 
Send us Thy faith and Thy love (Mark 11:23), 
which is the bond of perfectness. (Col. 3:14). Make 
us humble that Thou may est exalt us in due time. 
(1 Peter 5:6). Thou wilt show Thyself strong (2 
Chron. 16:8-9) in behalf of those whose hearts are 
perfect before Thee, and we are complete in Him. 
(Col. 2:10). Hear our prayers for all saints (Rom. 
8:26, 34; Eph. 4:12) and for the heathen. (Psalm 
2:8; Heb. 2:10-11). — Amen! 



IN TIME OF TROUBLE SAY: 

First — 

He brought me here — it is by His will I am in 
this strait place ; in that will I rest. 

Next — 

He will keep me in His love, and give me grace 
in this trial to behave as His child. 

Then — 

He will make the trial a blessing, teaching me the 
lessons He means me to learn, and working in me 
the grace He intends for me. 

Last — 

In His good time He can bring me out again, 
how and when He knows. 

Say — I am here 

i. By God's appointment. 

2. In God's keeping. 

3. Under His training. 

4. For His time. 

Andrew Murray. 



INTRODUCTION. 

I have been asked to write an introduction to a 
collection of extracts from my books. I gladly do 
so, as an acknowledgment of the love that has actu- 
ated the labor, and to bid the little book Godspeed 
on its way. When a servant of God knows that he 
has a message, however defective its delivery be, it 
is a joy to know that it has reached other hearts, 
and that it is by them being passed on farther. 

If any one asks me what that message has 
been, I think I may say honestly that it was nothing 
but this — that our Lord Jesus is willing to be far 
more to us than we know. All that we have enjoyed 
of Him is only a beginning. He is waiting to dis- 
possess and deliver from the life of Self and self 
effort, and to let the life, and the light, and the love 
of God fill us, and be our life in a degree and a 
power, we have very little idea of. For all that the 
Lord has allowed me to say, of the possibility of 
Abiding in Him, of being Like Him, of entering with 
Him into the Secret of prayer and intercession, into 



IO LIFE OF REV. ANDREW MURRAY. 

On his return, he married and resumed work in 
the Free State for three years, after which he ac- 
cepted a call to Worcester, in the colony. While 
there the wave of blessing which commenced in 
America, and crossed over to Great Britain, visited 
Africa and began in his congregation. This revival 
led to his writing those devotional books in Dutch, 
which being rewritten later on in English, has made 
his name so widely honored and dearly loved. It 
was during his ministry here, that he was chosen 
moderator of his church, which position he retained 
more than twenty-five years. A vacancy occurring 
in the Cape Town church, he accepted a call there, 
where he labored for seven years; but the strain 
of the Collegiate system and joint pastorate was too 
great for him, and he finally took a smaller charge 
at Wellington. His congregation is principally 
composed of French Huguenots, and here in 1874, 
inspired by the life of Mary Lyons, he founded the 
Huguenot seminary for girls. This school has 
eight hundred pupils, and branch seminaries at 
Paarl, Free State, Natal. The course includes 
Kindergarten, Normal Training and College. Many 
hundreds of these young women are working as 
Christian teachers, while quite one hundred are, or 
have been missionaries. Mr. Murray has ever taken 
an active part in the Home and Foreign missions of 
his church, and a sense of the need of workers led 
to his starting a Mission Training College, where 



LIFE OF REV. ANDREW MURRAY. II 

young men are trained in mission work and teach- 
ing, in 1882. He is the President of the Dutch Re- 
formed Church mission work in Nyassaland, where 
several of the young men and maidens of Welling- 
ton are working. 

He is also President of the South African General 
Mission, formed in 1894. This work is undenomi- 
national, among Jews, Africans, Hindoos and 
Europeans, and is under an executive board in South 
Africa, and a council in England. 



INDEX. 

PAGE 

January — Absolute Surrender. The True Vine.. 15 

February — Abide in Christ 35 

March — Like Christ 44 

April — Spirit of Christ 53 

May — With Christ. Ministry of Intercession. . 62 

June — New Life 79 

July — Holy in Christ. Love Made Perfect. Be 

Perfect 88 

August — Deeper Christian Life. Eagle Wings 

[English]. Waiting on God. Within.... 98 
September — Jesus Himself. Out of His Ful- 
ness. Master's Indwelling and Spiritual 

Life in U. S. A 109 

October— Why Do You Not Believe? Hu- 
mility 123 

November — Cross of Christ [in press] . Let Us 

Draw Nigh. Lord's Table 137 

December — Children for Christ. Grace of God 

and Money. Lord, Have Mercy 156 

The Two Covenants 168 

The School of Obedience [English] 176 



Hnfcrew flDurra^ U)ear Book* 



JANUARY. 

ABSOLUTE SURRENDER. 

1st. — When you get a promise from God it is 
worth just as much as a fulfilment. Only honor 
Him by trusting the promise and obeying Him, and 
any preparation that you still need, God knows 
about ; if there is anything that is to be opened up 
to you, He will do it, if you count upon Him to do 
it. Do not look to what we say or to what you 
think and understand. Look to God and expect 
God to do something. 

The true taking away of sin is this: — If the light 
comes in the darkness is expelled. It is the pres- 
ence of Jesus indwelling by the Holy Spirit, that 
can make us holy. 

The Spirit did all on the day of Pentecost and 
afterwards. It was the Spirit who gave the bold- 
ness, the wisdom, the message, the converting 
power. 



1 6 JANUARY. 

2(1. — Let everyone who longs for the blessing of 
the Spirit take these four little words as steps: — I 
must be filled, I may be filled, I would be filled, I 
shall be filled. 

What is obedience? Giving up my will to 
the will of another. Christ said, "Not my will, but 
Thine be done." Jesus gave up His life to God. 
and thereby taught us that the only thing that life 
is worth living for is to give it back to God even 
unto death. 

Christ could never have ascended to sit upon the 
throne, never could have accomplished His work 
of preparing the Kingdom that He could give to the 
Father, if He had not begun by giving up Himself, 
and let God do all. 

3rd. — The throne in heaven is not the throne of 
the Lamb of God alone; it is the throne of God. 
and the Lamb. Jesus went to share the throne 
with the Father, the Father was always the first and 
Jesus the second. 

There are two spirits on earth, Paul said: "We 
have received not the spirit of the world, but the 
Spirit that is of God." That is the great want in 
every worker — the spirit of the world going out, 
and the Spirit of God coming in to take possession 
of the inner life and of the whole being. 



JANUARY. 17 

Oh, what fellowship! The Holy Spirit in heaven 
doing part of the work, man on earth doing the 
other part. After the ordination of the men upon 
earth, it is written in God's inspired Word that they 
were sent forth by the Holy Ghost. 

4th. — Jesus said to Peter: "Deny Thyself," and 
again "Thou wilt deny me." There is no choice 
for us, we must either deny self or deny Christ. 

It is when the individual workers are blessed that 
the work will prosper, and the body be in health 
and strength. 

Before God took His Son up to heaven, He let 
Him live here upon earth, that in His life I might 
have a complete representation of what my God 
wanted me to be and was willing to make me. 

Absolute surrender! How am I to live that life? 
The Father points to the beloved Son and says: 
"This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well 
pleased." Hear Him, follow Him, live like Him, 
let Christ be the rule of your life. 

Deliverance from the self-life means to be a ves- 
sel overflowing with love to everybody all the day. 

5th. — If a vessel that ought to be one whole is 
cracked into many pieces, it cannot be filled. You 
can take out one part and dip out a little water, but 



1 8 JANUARY. 

if you want the vessel full, the vessel must be whole. 
This is true of Christ's church. If there is one 
thing we have to pray for it is this: Lord, melt us 
together into One by the power of the Holy Spirit. 

The will of the creature is nothing but an empty 
vessel in which the power of God is to be made 
manifest. 

God does not work by His Spirit as He works 
by a blind force in nature. He leads His people 
on as reasonable, intelligent beings, and, therefore, 
when we have come to the end of self, to the con- 
viction that though we have been striving to obey 
the law, we have failed, then He shows us that in 
the Holy Spirit we have the power of obedience, 
victory, real holiness. 

6th. — When a question is asked an answer is ex- 
pected. Alas, how many Christians are content 
with the question: "O, wretched man that I am! 
Who shall deliver me from the body of this death ?" 
Instead of saying: "I thank God through Jesus 
Christ our Lord," they are forever repeating the 
question without the answer. 

God has called the Church of Christ to live in the 
power of the Holy Spirit, and the Church is living 
for the most part in the power of human flesh, and of 
will and energy and effort apart from the Spirit of 



JANUARY. 19 

God. If the Church will return to acknowledge 
that the Holy Spirit is her strength and her help, to 
give up everything and wait upon God to be filled 
with the Spirit, her days of beauty and gladness will 
return, and we shall see the glory of God revealed 
amongst us. 

7th. — I have often been asked by young Chris- 
tians, "Why is it that I fail so? I did so solemnly 
vow with my whole heartand did desire to serveGod; 
why have I failed ?" You are trying to do in your 
own strength what Christ alone can do in you. You 
were trusting in yourself or you could not have 
failed. If you had trusted Christ, He could not 
fail. 

You cannot work out God's will, but His Holy 
Spirit can; and until the Church, until believers 
grasp this and cease trying by human effort to do 
God's will, and wait upon the Holy Spirit to come 
with all His omnipotent and enabling power, the 
Church will never be what God wants her to be, 
and what God is willing to make of her. 

We find the Christian life so difficult because we 
seek for God's blessing, while we live in our own 
will. We make our own plans and choose our own 
work and then we ask Him to give us His blessing. 

8th. — You may have ten hours' hard work daily, 



20 JANUARY. 

during which your brain has to be occupied with 
temporal things ; God orders it so. But abiding in 
Jesus is the work of the heart, not of the brain, the 
heart clinging to and resting in Jesus, a work in 
which the Holy Spirit links us to Jesus. Deeper 
down than the brain, deep down in the inner life, 
you can abide in Christ so that every moment you 
are free the consciousness will come: Blessed Jesus, 
I am still in Thee. 

Do not confound work and fruit. There may 
be a good deal of work for Christians that is not the 
fruit of the Heavenly Vine. Do not seek for work 
only. Fruit bearing means the very life and power 
and spirit and love within the heart of the Son of 
God — the Heavenly Vine Himself coming into your 
heart and mine. 



9th. — God hath begotten us to an inheritance 
incorruptible, reserved in heaven for you, who are 
kept by the power of God. My God is keeping the 
inheritance for me, and keeping me for the inheri- 
tance. The same power, the same love, the same 
God doing the double work. 

I have a watch borrowed from a friend. I in- 
jure the watch, the hands are broken, face defaced, 
some of the wheels and springs spoiled, and I take 
it back in that condition. My friend would say: 



JANUARY. 21 

"I did not want you to keep my watch so that you 
should bring me back only the shell of the watch. 
I expected you to keep every part of it." So God 
does not want to keep us in this general way, so 
that we shall just get into heaven; but the keeping- 
power and love of God applies to every particular 
of our being. 

ioth. — The altar sanctifies the gift; Christ is not 
only the Priest and the Victim, but the Living 
Christ is Himself the Altar. All unworthy and all 
feeble though I be, the altar sanctifies the gift, and 
in Jesus and resting on Him, my God accepts my 
feebleness, and I am well pleasing in His sight. 

Do you see yonder clock? If I see that the hands 
stand still, and point wrong, and that the clock is slow 
or fast, I say that there is something inside the 
clock that is wrong. Temper is like the revelation 
that the clock gives of what is within, is a proof of 
whether the love of Christ is filling the heart. 

nth. — Does it cost the lamb any trouble to be 
jentle? No, it is its nature. Why does it cost a 
wolf no trouble to be cruel and to put its fangs into 
the poor lamb? Because that is its nature. How 
can I learn to love? Never, until the Spirit of God 
fills my heart with God's love. 

There is a difference between the power of the 



22 JANUARY. 

Spirit as a gift and the power of the Spirit for the 
grace of a holy life. A man may often have a 
measure of the power of the Spirit, but if there be 
not a large measure of the Spirit as the Spirit of 
grace and of holiness, the defect will be manifest in 
his work. 

1 2th. — On the day of Pentecost the Holy Spirit 
came, and Peter was a changed man. When he 
said to Christ, "Thou never canst suffer," he had 
not a conception of what it was to pass through 
death into life. When I hear him say, "If ye be 
reproached for the name of Christ, happy are ye, 
for the Spirit of God and of glory resteth upon you," 
that is not the old Peter, but the very Spirit of 
Christ breathing and speaking within him. 

Suppose that when a painter came into his studio 
to paint an unfinished picture, the canvas always 
removed to some other part of the room. Of course 
the painter could not paint. Suppose the canvas to 
say: "O, painter, I will be still, come and paint thy 
beautiful picture." Then the painter would come 
and do it. Say to God, "Thou art the wondrous 
artist. I am still. I trust Thy power." God will 
then work wonders with you. God never works 
anything but wonders. 

13th. — Your religious life is every day to be a 



JANUARY. 23 

proof that God works impossibilities ; your religious 
life is to be a series of impossibilities made possible 
and actual by God's Almighty power. I do not want 
a little of God's power, but I want — with reverence 
be it said — the whole of God's omnipotence to keep 
me right and make me live like a Christian. 

Is it not often true that our work comes between 
us and Jesus? Sad thought that the bearing of 
fruit should separate the branch from the vine. 
That must be because we have looked upon our 
work as something else than the branch bearing 
fruit. 

I thank God for the interest that He is awakening 
in foreign missions, in drunkards, in the poor out- 
cast, but your middle classes, your richer and higher 
classes, is there no power in your duty to take the 
gospel to them boldly? 



THE TRUE VINE. 

14th. — All that Christ is and has, He has, not in 
Himself, but from the Father. Before He ever 
uses the word, or speaks at all of abiding in Him, 
or bearing fruit, Christ turns their eyes heavenward 
to the Father watching over them, and working 
all in them. The great lack of the Christian life 
is that, even where we trust Christ, we leave God 



24 JANUARY. 

out of the count. Christ came to bring us to God. 
Christ lived the life of a man exactly as we have to 
live it. Christ, the Vine, points to God, the Hus- 
bandman. 

15th. — Think of the vine first: — the branch has 
but one object for which it exists, one purpose to 
which it is entirely given up, — to bear the fruit the 
vine wishes to bring forth. And so the believer has 
but one reason for his being a Branch — but one rea- 
son for his existence on earth — that the Heavenly 
Vine may through him bring forth His fruit. Sec- 
ond: — the branch is exactly like the vine in every 
aspect — the same nature, the same life, the same 
place, the same work. In all this they are insepar- 
ably one. And so the believer needs to know that 
he is partaker of the Divine nature, and has the 
very nature and spirit of Christ in him, and that his 
one calling is, to yield himself to a perfect con- 
formity to Christ. Third: — The vine has its stores 
of life and sap and strength, not for itself, but for the 
branches. The branches are and have nothing, but 
what the vine provides and imparts. The branch 
has but to yield itself and receive. This truth leads 
to the blessed rest of faith, the true secret of growth 
and strength: "I can do all things through Christ 
which strengtheneth me." 

16th. — Ere we begin to think of fruit or branches, 



JANUARY. 25 

let us have our heart filled with the faith: as glori- 
ous as the Vine is the Husbandman. As high and 
holy as is our calling, so mighty and loving is the 
God who will work it all. As surely as the Hus- 
bandman made the Vine what it was to be, will He 
make each branch what it is to be. Many Christ- 
ians think their own salvation is the first thing; then 
temporal life the second; and what is left of time 
and interest may be devoted to fruit bearing to the 
saving of men; in most cases, very little time or 
interest can be found. The one condition of my 
abiding and growing strong is that I bear the fruit 
of the Heavenly Vine for dying men to eat and 
live. 

17th. — As churches and individuals, we are in 
danger of nothing so much as self-contentment. 
The secret spirit of Laodicea: We are rich and in- 
creased in goods, and have need of nothing, — may 
prevail where not suspected. The Divine warning: 
Poor and wretched and miserable, finds little re- 
sponse just where most needed. Let us not rest 
content with the thought that we are taking an 
equal share with others in the work, or that men 
are satisfied with our efforts. Let our only desire 
be to know whether we are bearing all the fruit 
Christ is willing to give through us as living 
Branches, in close and living union with Himself. 

18th. — What a solemn, precious lesson! It is 



26 JANUARY. 

not to sin only, that the cleansing of the Husband- 
man refers. It is to our own religious activity, as 
it is developed in the very act of bearing fruit. In 
working for God, our natural gifts of wisdom, or 
eloquence, or influence, or zeal are ever in danger of 
being unduly developed, and then trusted in. So, 
after each season of work, God has to bring us to the 
end of ourselves, to the consciousness of the help- 
lessness and the danger of all that is of man, to feel 
that we are nothing. All that is to be left of us is 
just enough to receive the power of the life-giving 
sap of the Holy Spirit. What is of man must be 
reduced to its very lowest measure. All that is in- 
consistent with the most entire devotion to Christ's 
service, must be removed. The more perfect the 
cleansing and cutting away of all that is of self, the 
less of surface over which the Holy Spirit is to be 
spread, so much the more intense can be the con- 
centration of our whole being, to be entirely at the 
disposal of the Spirit. 

19th. — Many believers pray and long very earn- 
estly for the filling of the Spirit and the indwelling 
of Christ, and wonder that they do not make more 
progress. The reason is often this, the "I in you" 
cannot come because the "Abide in Me" is not 
maintained. "There is one body and one spirit;" 
before the Spirit can fill, there must be a body pre- 
pared. The graft must have grown into the stem, 



JANUARY. 27 

and be abiding in it before the sap can flow through 
to bring forth fruit. It is as in lowly obedience we 
follow Christ, even in external things, denying our- 
selves, forsaking the world, and even in the body, 
seeking to be conformable to Him, as we thus seek 
to abide in Him, that we shall be able to receive 
and enjoy the "I in you." The work enjoined on 
us: "Abide in Me," will prepare us for the work 
undertaken by Him: "I in you." 

The vision of Christ is an irresistible attraction; 
it draws and holds us like a magnet. Listen ever 
to the living Christ still speaking to you, and wait- 
ing to show r you the meaning and power of His 
word: / am the Vine. So it sometimes comes, 
that souls who have never been specially occupied 
with the thought of abiding, are abiding all the 
time, because they are occupied with Christ. 

20th. — Have you ever noticed the difference in 
the Christian life between work and fruit? A 
machine can do work; only life can bear fruit. A 
law can compel work; only love can spontaneously 
bring forth fruit. Work implies effort and labor; 
the essential idea of fruit is, that it is the silent, 
natural, restful produce of our inner life. The con- 
nection between work and fruit is, perhaps, best 
seen in the expression, "fruitful in every good 
work." (Col. 1. 10.) It is only when good works 
come as the fruit of the indwelling Spirit that they 



28 JANUARY. 

are acceptable to God. Under the compulsion of 
law and conscience, or the influence of inclination 
and zeal, men may be most diligent in good works, 
and yet find that they have but little spiritual re- 
sult. Their works are man's effort, instead of being 
the fruit of the Spirit, the restful, natural outcome 
of the Spirit's operation within us. 

2 1 st. — A deep conviction of the truth of this 
word, "Except ye abide in Me, ye can do nothing," 
lies at the very root of a strong spiritual life. As 
little as I created myself, as little as I could raise 
a man from the dead, can I give myself the Divine 
life, maintain or increase it: every motion is the 
work of God through Christ and His Spirit. As a 
man believes this, he will take up that position of 
entire and continual dependence which is the very 
essence of the life of faith. His whole heart says 
Amen to the word: You can do nothing. And just 
because he does so, he can also say: "I can do all 
things in Christ who strengtheneth me." 

22nd. — We can only fulfil our calling to bear 
much fruit, by praying much. In Christ are hid all 
the treasures men around us need; in Him all God's 
children are blessed with all spiritual blessings ; He 
is full of grace and truth. But it needs prayer, 
much prayer, strong believing prayer, to bring 
these blessings down. We cannot appropriate the 



JANUARY. 29 

promise in John xv. 7, without a life given up for 
men. 

23rd. — There have always been a smaller number 
of God's people who have sought to serve Him 
with their whole heart, while the majority have been 
content with a very small measure of the knowledge 
of His grace and will. 

And what is the difference between this smaller 
inner circle and the many who do not seek admis- 
sion to it? We find it in the words: Much fruit. 
With many Christians the thought of personal 
safety, which at their first awakening was a legiti- 
mate one, remains to the end the one aim of their 
religion. The idea of service and fruit is always a 
secondary and very subordinate one. We see in 
God's Word everywhere these two classes of dis- 
ciples. Let our desire be nothing less than perfect 
cleansing, unbroken abiding, closest communion, 
abundant fruitfulness, — true Branches of the True 
Vine. 

24th. — Some have told of a wonderful change, 
by which their life of continual failure and stumbling 
had been changed into a very blessed experience 
of being kept and strengthened and made exceed- 
ing glad. If you asked them how this great bless- 
ing came to them, many would tell you it was 



3<3 JANUARY. 

simply this, that they were led to believe that this 
abiding in Christ's love was meant to be a reality, 
and that they were made willing to give up every- 
thing for it, and then enabled to trust Christ to 
make it true to them. The feebleness of our Christ- 
ian life is that we do not take time to believe that 
this Divine love does really delight in us, and will 
possess and work all in us. We do not take time to 
look at the Vine bearing the Branch so entirely, 
working all in it so completely. We strive to do 
for ourselves what Christ alone can, what Christ, 
oh! so lovingly, longs to do for us. 

25th. — Through His will, loved and done, lies 
the path to His love. A sin of ignorance has still 
the nature of sin. God will deal with this in due 
time in the way of searching and humbling, and if 
we be simple and faithful, give us larger deliverance 
than we dare expect. Obedience has reference to the 
positive keeping of the commandments of our 
Lord, and the performance of His will in everything 
in which we know it. It is the whole-hearted sur- 
render in everything to do His will, that gives ac- 
cess to a life in the abiding enjoyment of His love. 
It is only through knowing God's will one can 
know His heart, and only through doing that will 
one can abide in His love. 

26th. — God's will is the very centre of His 



JANUARY. 31 

Divine perfection. As revealed in His command- 
ments, it opens up the way for the creature to grow 
into the likeness of the Creator. In accepting and 
doing His will, I rise into fellowship with Himself. 
Therefore it was that the Son, when coming into the 
world spoke: I come to do Thy will, O God! This 
was the place and this would be the blessedness of 
the creature. This was what he had lost in the 
Fall. This was what Christ came to restore. This 
is what, as the Heavenly Vine, He asks of us and 
imparts to us, that even as He, by keeping His 
Father's commandments, abode in His love, we 
should keep His commandments and abide in His 
love. 



27th. — The Word is God's pruning knife, sharper 
than any two-edged sword that pierces even to the 
dividing asunder of the soul and spirit, and is 
quick to discern the thoughts and intents of the 
heart. Only when affliction leads to the Word, 
does it become a blessing; the lack of this heart- 
cleansing through the Word is the reason why 
affliction is so often unsanctified. Jesus says, "Ye 
are already clean because of the Word I have spoken 
unto you." It is as the soul gives up its own 
thoughts and men's thoughts of what is religion, 
and yields itself heartily, humbly, patiently, to the 
teaching of the Word by the Spirit, that the 
Father will do His blessed work of pruning and 



32 JANUARY. 

cleansing away all of nature and self that mixes 
with our work and hinders His Spirit. If any one 
asks, "How can I be a happy Christian?" our 
Lord's answer is very simple: "These things," 
about the Vine and the Branches, "I have spoken to 
you that My joy may be in you and that your joy 
may be fulfilled." You cannot have my joy without 
My life. Abide in Me and let Me abide in you, and 
My joy will be in you. All healthy life is a thing 
of joy and beauty ; live undividedly the Branch life ; 
you will have His joy in full measure. 

28th. — To many Christians the thought of a life 
wholly abiding in Christ is one of strain and pain- 
ful effort. The strain and effort only come as long 
as we do not yield ourselves unreservedly to the 
life of Christ in us. The very first words of the 
parable are not yet opened up to them: "I am the 
true Vine; I undertake all and provide for all; I 
ask nothing of the Branch but that it yields wholly 
to Me, and allows Me to do all. I engage to make 
and keep the Branch all that it ought to be." 

Salvation is nothing but love conquering and 
entering into us ; we have just as much of salvation 
as we have of love. Full salvation is perfect love. 
There is no knowing God but by having the life; 
the life working in us alone gives the knowledge. 
And even so, the love; if we would know it, we 



JANUARY. 33 

must drink of its living stream, we must have it 
shed forth by the Holy Spirit in us. 

29th. — As we know His dying love, we shall joy- 
fully obey its commands, as we obey the commands 
we shall know the love more fully. The imperative 
necessity of obedience, doing all that Christ com- 
mands us, has not the place in our Christian teach- 
ing and living that Christ meant it to have. We 
have given a far higher place to privilege than to 
duty. We have not considered implicit obedience 
as a condition of true discipleship. The secret 
thought that it is impossible to do the things He 
commands us, and that therefore it cannot be ex- 
pected of us, a subtle and unconscious feeling that 
sinning is a necessity, has frequently robbed both 
precepts and promises of their power. Let us take 
Christ's words as most literally true, and make 
nothing less the law of our life. "Ye are My friends 
if ye do the things that I command you." 

30th. — Throughout Scripture this is the great 
object of the teaching of election. — "Predestinated 
to be conformed to the image of His Son" (to be 
Branches in the image and likeness of the Vine.) 
"Chosen that we should be holy." "Chosen to salva- 
tion through sanctification of the Spirit." "Elect in 
sanctification of the Spirit unto obedience." In 
John xv. 1 6, Christ reveals His two-fold purpose in 



34 JANUARY. 

choosing us to be His branches: that we may bear 
fruit on earth, and have power in prayer in heaven. 

31st. — Are you leaving your mark for eternity on 
those around you? It is not your preaching or 
teaching, your strength of will or power to influence 
that will secure this. All depends on having your 
life full of God and His power. And that again 
depends upon your living the truly Branch-like life 
of abiding — very close and unbroken fellowship 
with Christ. It is the Branch that abides in Him, 
that brings forth much fruit, fruit that will abide. 
It is because we so little live the true Branch life, 
because we so little lose ourselves in the Vine, 
abiding in Him entirely, that we feel so little con- 
strained to much prayer, so little confident that we 
shall be heard, and so do not know how to use His 
name as the key of God's storehouse. The power 
of direct access to the Father for men, the liberty 
of intercession claiming and receiving blessing for 
them in faith, is the highest exercise of our union 
with Christ. Let all who would truly and fully be 
Branches, give themselves to the work of interces- 
sion. It is the one great work of Christ, the Vine 
in heaven, the source of power for all His work. 
Make it your one great work as Branch: it will be 
the power of all your work, 



FEBRUARY. 

A'BIDE IN CHRIST. 

ist. — If, in our orthodox churches, the living 
union with Christ, the experience of His daily and 
hourly presence and keeping, were preached with 
the same distinction and urgency as His atonement, 
many would be found to accept with gladness the 
invitation to such a life, and its influence would be 
manifest in their experience of the purity and the 
power, the love and the joy, the fruit-bearing, and 
all the blessedness which the Saviour connected 
with the abiding in Him. 

2nd. — We all know the need of time for our meals 
each day. If we are to live through Jesus, we must 
thoroughly take in and assimilate that heavenly food 
the Father has given us in His life. My brother, 
who would learn to abide in Jesus, take time each 
day, to put yourself into living contact with the 
living Jesus, to yield yourself distinctly and con- 
sciously to His blessed influence ; so will you give 
Him the opportunity of taking hold of you, of draw- 
ing vou up and keeping you safe in His almighty 
life. * 



36 FEBRUARY. 

3rd. — Jesus gives rest in Him. The rest of 
pardon and acceptance the rest in His love. But, 
we know that all that God bestows needs time to 
become fully our own; it must be held fast, and 
appropriated, and assimilated into our inmost being ; 
without this not even Christ's giving can make it 
our very own, in full experience and enjoyment. 

4th. — Giving up one's whole life to Him, for Him 
alone to rule and order it ; taking up His yoke, and 
submitting to be led and taught, to learn of Him ; 
abiding in Him, to be and do only what He wills ; 
— these are the conditions of discipleship without 
which there can be no thought of maintaining the 
rest that was bestowed on first coming to Christ. 
The Christians rest is in Christ, and not of the 
Christian. He gives it not apart from Himself, and 
so it is only in having Him that the rest can really 
be kept and enjoyed. 

5th. — Consecration and faith are the essential ele- 
ments of the Christian life, the giving up all to Jesus, 
the receiving all from Jesus. They are implied in 
each other; they are united in the one word — sur- 
render. 

6th. — Abiding in Him is not a work that we have 
to do as the condition for enjoying His salvation, 
but a consenting to let Him do all for us. 



FEBRUARY. 37 

7th. — It was because Paul knew that the Mighty 
and the Faithful One had grasped him with the 
glorious purpose of making him one with Himself, 
that he did his utmost to grasp the glorious prize. 

8th. — Asaprophet, Christ is our wisdom, revealing 
to us God and His love, with the nature and conditions 
of the salvation that love has prepared. As a priest, 
He is our righteousness, restoring us to right rela- 
tions to God, and securing us His favor and friend- 
ship. As a king, He is our sanctification, forming 
and guiding us into the obedience to the Father's 
holy will. As these three offices work out God's 
purpose, the grand consummation will be reached, 
the complete deliverance from sin and all its effects 
be accomplished, and ransomed humanity regain all 
that it had ever lost. 

9th. — What we do is only the manifestation of 
what God is doing in us! but the grace the promise 
offered is so large, so God-like, so beyond all our 
thoughts, that we do not take it really to mean what 
it says. 

ioth. — The believer knows himself to be in the 
school of God, a teacher who plans the whole course 
of study for each of His pupils with infinite wisdom, 
and delights to have them come daily for the les- 
sons He has to give. All the believer asks is to feel 



38 FEBRUARY. 

himself constantly in God's hands, •< nd to follow His 
guidance, neither lagging behind nor going before. 

nth. — For the sanctifying of our memory, in the 
service of our spiritual life, God has provided most 
bountifully; the Holy Spirit is — blessed be God — 
the memory of the new man. It is as we see what 
Jesus is, and is to us, that the abiding in Him will 
become the natural and spontaneous result of our 
knowlege of Him. 

1 2th. — Each blessed experience we receive as a 
gift of God, must at once be returned back to Him 
from whom it came, in praise and love, in self sac- 
rifice and service; so only can it be restored to us 
again, fresh and beautiful with the bloom of heaven. 

13th. — Whether we look backward and see the 
work He has done, or upward and see the reward 
He has in the Father's love that passeth knowledge, 
or forward in the continual accessions of joy as sin- 
ners are brought home, His joy is ours. 

14th. — Our difficulties all arise from the want of 
the full surrender to a full abiding. Do thou but 
yield up thyself to Christ thy Lord ; the conquering 
power of His incoming presence will make it joy 
to cast out all that before was most precious. "A 
hundredfold in this life:" this word of the Master 



FEBRUARY. 39 

comes true to all who with with whole-hearted faith- 
fulness, accept His commands to forsake all. 

15th. — The heart occupied with its own plans and 
efforts for doing God's will, and securing the bless- 
ing of abiding in Jesus, must fail continually. God 
can do His work perfectly only when the soul ceases 
from its work. He will do His work mightily in 
the soul that honors Him by expecting Him to work 
both to will and to do. 

16th. — Christ was the revelation of the Father on 
earth. Believers are the revelation of Christ on 
earth. They cannot be this unless there be perfect 
unity, so that the world can know that He loves them 
and has sent them. But they can be it if Christ 
loves them with infinite love that gives itself and 
all it has, and if they abide in that love. 

17th. — The secret of a life of close abiding will 
be seen to be simply this: As I give myself wholly 
to Christ, I find the power to take Him wholly for 
myself ; and as I lose myself and all I have for Him, 
He takes me wholly for Himself, and gives Himself 
wholly to me. 

Let a living faith in Christ working in you be the 
secret spring of all your work. 

1 8th. — The believer who studies this life of Christ 
as the pattern and the promise of what his may be, 



40 FEBRUARY. 

learns to understand how the "Without me ye can 
do nothing," is but the forerunner of "I can do all 
things through Christ who strengthened me." We 
learn to glory in infirmities, to take pleasure in 
necessities and distresses for Christ's sake; for 
"When I am weak, then am I strong." 

19th. — In the life of Divine love, the emptying of 
self and the sacrifice of our will is the surest way to 
have all we can wish or will. Dependence, subjec- 
tion, self-sacrifice, are for the Christian as for Christ 
the blessed path of life. Like as Christ lived 
through and in the Father, even so the believer, in 
and through Christ. 

20th. — To him who is really seeking to abide in 
Christ's love, the commands become no less precious 
than the promises. As much as the promises they 
are the revelation of the Divine love, blessed helpers 
in the path to a closer union with the Lord. 

2 1 st. — No sooner is the doing of God's will to the 
Christian what Scripture and the Holy Spirit reveal 
it to be, — the restoration to communion with God 
and conformity to Him, — than he feels that there 
is no law more natural or more beautiful than this: 
Keeping Christ's commandments the way to abide 
in Christ's love. 

22nd. — The weakest believer may be confident 
that in asking to be kept from sin, to grow in holi- 



FEBRUARY. 41 

ness, to bring forth much fruit, he may count upon 
these his petitions being fulfilled with Divine power. 
The power is in Jesus ; Jesus is ours with all His 
fulness; it is in us His members that the power is 
to work and to be made manifest. 

23rd. — The promise, "Whatsoever ye ask in my 
name/' may not be severed from the commandment, 
"Whatsoever ye do, do all in the name of the Lord 
Jesus." If the name of Christ is to be wholly at my 
disposal, I must first put myself wholly at His dis- 
posal, so that He has full and free command of me. 
It is the abiding in Christ that gives the right and 
power to use His name with confidence. 

24th. — We have each day to be faithful for the 
one short day, and long years and a long life take 
care of themselves, without the sense of their length 
or their weight ever being a burden. The single 
days do indeed make up the whole life, and the 
value of each single day depends on its influence 
on the whole. 

25th. — Abiding by faith in Christ our sanctifica- 
tion is the simple secret of a holy life. The measure 
of sanctification will depend on the measure of abid- 
ing in Him ; as the soul learns wholly to abide in 
Christ, the promise is increasingly fulfilled: "The 
very God of peace sanctify you wholly." 



4^ FEBRUARY. 

26th. — As our communion with Him becomes 
more intimate and intense, and we let the Holy 
Spirit reveal Him to us in His heavenly glory, the 
more we realize how the life in us is the life of One 
who sits upon the throne of heaven. We feel the 
power of an endless life working in us. We taste the 
eternal life. We have the foretaste of the eternal 
glory. 

27th.- — Not only is what is given up to Christ re- 
ceived back again to become doubly our own, but 
the forsaking all is followed by the receiving all. 
We abide in Christ more fully as we forsake all and 
follow Him. As I count all things loss for His 
sake, I am found in HIM. 

28th. — In Him thou seest a thousand times more 
given thee than thou has lost; seest how God only 
took from thee that thou mightest have room to 
take from Him what is so much better. 

When thou seest affliction coming meet it in 
Christ; when it is come, feel that thou art more in 
Christ than in it, for He is nearer thee than afflic- 
tion ever can be; when it is passing, still abide in 
Him. 

29th. — Our daily life must have for its object the 
making of an impression favorable to Jesus. When 
you look at the branch, you see at once the likeness 



FEBRUARY. 43 

to the Vine. We must live so that somewhat of the 
holiness and the gentleness of Jesus may shine out 
in us. We must live to represent Him. 

Work for Christ has sometimes drawn away from 
Christ, and taken the place of fellowship with Him. 



MARCH. 



LIKE CHRIST. 



ist. — To study the image of God in the Man, 
Christ Jesus, to yield and set open our inmost being 
for that image to take possession and live in us, and 
then to go forth and let the heavenly likeness re- 
flect itself and shine out in our life among our fellow 
men, — this is what we have been redeemed for, let 
this be what we live for. 

2nd. — The reason why we so often do not bless 
others is that we wish to address them as their supe- 
riors in grace or gifts, or at least their equals. The 
love of Christ flowing into you, will flow again from 
you and make it your greatest joy to follow His ex- 
ample in washing the feet of others. 

3rd. — The external and bodily is the gate to the 
inner and spiritual life, He makes the salvation of 
the soul the first object in His holy ministry of love, 
at the same time, however, seeking the way to the 
hearts by the ready service of love in the little and 
common things of daily life. 



MARCH. 45 

4th. — Because my Surety is not some one outside 
of me, but one in whom I am, and who is in me, 
therefore it is that I can become like Him. He lives 
Himself in me. To follow His footsteps is a duty, 
because it is a possibility, the natural result of the 
wonderful union between Head and Members. I 
have to gaze on His example so as to know and fol- 
low it; and to abide in Him and onen my heart to 
the blessed workings of His life in me. 

5th. — As surely as Jesus conquered sin and its 
curse for me, will He conquer it in its power in me. 
What He began by His death for me, He will per- 
fect by His life in me. 

6th. — Taking up the cross and following Jesus is 
nothing less than living every day with our own life 
and will given up to death. The crucified Christ 
and the crucified Christian belong to each other. 
The Christian glories in the cross because it makes 
him a partner in a death and victory that has 
already been accomplished, and in which the deliv- 
erance from the powers of the flesh and of the world 
has been secured to him. 

7th. — The Lord Jesus has shown us that the best 
place to practice self-denial is in our ordinary inter- 
course with men. 

8th. — Who can say whether this is not one of the 
secrets which eternity will reveal, that sin was per- 



46 MARCH. 

mitted because otherwise God's love could never so 
fully have been revealed? The highest glory of 
God's love was manifest in the self-sacrifice of 
Christ. Without entire self-sacrifice we cannot love 
as Jesus loved. 

9th. — It is only when we sacrifice ourselves to 
God that there will be the power for an entire self- 
sacrifice. When faith has first appropriated the 
promise/Tnasmuch as ye have done it unto the least 
of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me," I 
understand the glorious harmony between sacrifice 
to God and sacrifice for men. 

10th. — The freer the Church is of the spirit and 
principles of the world, the more influence she will 
exert in it. The believer sees that the only way to 
answer to his calling is, as crucified to the world, to 
withdraw himself from its power, as living in Christ 
to go into it and bless it. He lives in heaven and 
walks on earth. 

nth. — The church of Christ in her mission: "Go 
ye and teach all nations," has the promise, "Lo, I 
am with you always." The Lord does not demand 
anything which He does not give the power to per- 
form. The Lord Jesus will give His people all the 
preparation they need. 

12th. — Christ's mission is the only reason for our 
being on earth. Just as with Jesus, our heavenly 



MARCH. 47 

mission demands nothing less than entire consecra- 
tion. 

13th. — The stronger the Christian's faith is in 
God's everlasting purpose, the more his courage for 
work will be strengthened ; the more he works and 
is blessed, the clearer it will become that all is of 
God. 

14th. — The great object of redemption was to 
make us and our will free from the power of sin and 
to lead us again to live and do the will of God. In 
His life on earth, He showed us what it is to live 
only for the will of God; in His death and resur- 
rection He won for us the power to live and do the 
will of God as He had done. 

15th. — Not herein is sin, that man has a creature 
will different from the Creator's, but in this that he 
clings to his own will when it is seen to be contrary 
to the will of the Creator. Take God's will as one 
great whole, as the only thing for which you live on 
earth. 

16th. — God's will only seems hard, as we look at 
it from a distance and are unwilling to submit to it. 
How beautiful the will of God makes everything in 
Nature! The will of God is the will of His love, 
how can you fear to surrender yourself to it? 

17th. — A hearty obedience to the commandments 
and a ready obedience to the conscience are the 



48 MARCH. 

preparation for that divine teaching of the spirit 
which will lead thee deeper into the meaning and 
application of the Word and into a more direct and 
spiritual insight into God's will with regard to thy- 
self personally. It is to those who obey Him, God 
gives the Holy Spirit, through whom the blessed 
will of God becomes the light that shines ever more 
brightly on our path! — "If any man will do His 
will, he shall know." 

1 8th. — A Christlike sense of Sonship will lead to 
a Christlike obedience. 

19th. — It was the compassionate sympathy of 
Jesus that attracted so many to Him upon earth; 
that same compassionate tenderness will still, more 
than anything, draw souls to you and your Lord. 

20th. — Just in proportion as we live in more or 
less entire dependence on the Father, will His life 
plan for us be more or less perfectly w r orked out in 
our lives. The nearer the believer comes to this 
entire dependence of the Son, doing nothing but 
what He sees the Father do, and then to His im- 
plicit obedience, whatsoever he doeth, doing these 
in like manner, so much more will the promise be 
fulfilled in us. The Father showeth him all things 
that He Himself doeth, and will show him greater 
works than these. 



MARCH. 49 

2 1 st. — The desire for independence was the temp- 
tation in Paradise, is the temptation in each human 
heart. It seems hard to be nothing, to know noth- 
ing, to will nothing. And yet it is so blessed. This 
dependence brings us into most blessed communion 
with God, it takes from us all care and responsi- 
bility. It gives us real power and strength of will, 
because we know that He works in us to will and to 
do. It gives us the blessed assurance that our work 
will succeed, because we have allowed God alone to 
take charge of it. 

22nd. — Just because Jesus' life was strong and true, 
it could not bear the loss of direct and constant in- 
tercourse with the Father, with whom and in whom 
it had its being, and its blessedness. Even work in 
the service of God and of love is exhausting; we 
cannot bless others without power going out from 
us ; this must be renewed from above. It is from 
heaven alone that the power to lead a heavenly life 
on earth can come. 

23rd. — The entire sacrifice of ourselves to God 
in every prayer of daily life is the only preparation 
for those single hours of soul-struggle in which we 
may be called to some special act of the surrender 
of the will that costs us tears and anguish. But he 
who has learnt the former, will surely receive 
strength for the latter. 



50 MARCH. 

24th. — When we behold the glory of God in 
Christ, in the glass of the Holy Scriptures, His glory 
shines upon us, and into us, and fills us, until it 
shines out from us again. Beholding Jesus makes 
us like Him. 

25th. — It is grace we need, and not sin to make 
and keep us humble. The heaviest laden branches 
always bow the lowest. The nearer the soul comes 
to God, the more His majestic Presence makes it 
feel its littleness. 

26th. — If the believer holds fast what his partici- 
pation with Christ's death signifies, he has the power 
to overcome sin. It is not said Sin is dead ; but he, 
himself is dead to sin and alive to God, and so sin 
cannot for a single moment, without his consent, 
have dominion over him. If he sin, it is because he 
allows it to reign and submits himself to it. 

27th. — How many have been looking most ear- 
nestly for the full insight into the blessedness of 
being "dead unto sin and alive unto God," and yet 
have failed. They have been more occupied with 
the blessings to be had in Jesus, or with the effort to 
exercise a strong abiding faith in these blessings as 
theirs, than with Jesus Himself, in whom both the 
blessings and the faith that sees them are ours. 

28th. — It is as you bear the image of God here, 
as you live in the likeness of Jesus, who is the 



MARCH. 51 

brightness of His glory, and the express image of 
His person, that you will be fitted for the glory to 
come. If we are to bear the image of the heavenly, 
the Christ in glory, we must first bear the image of 
the earthly, the Christ in humiliation. 

29th. — To be filled with the Holy Spirit, we must 
wait on our Lord in faith. His love desires to give 
us more than we know. You are in the Spirit as 
your vital air ; the Spirit is in you as your life-breath. 
It is impossible to say what the Lord Jesus would 
do for a soul who is truly willing to live as entirely 
through Him, as He is through the Father. 

30th. — With what care the tenderly sensitive plate 
of the photographer is prepared to receive the im- 
pression; with what precaution its relative position 
to the object to be portrayed is adjusted ; how still 
and undisturbed it is then held face to face with that 
object. Having done this, the photographer leaves 
the light to do its wonderful work; his work is a 
work of faith. Let us believe in the power of the 
light of God to transcribe Christ's image on our 
heart. Let us not seek to do the work the Spirit 
must do. Let us simply trust Him to do it. Our 
duty is to seek the prepared heart waiting, longing, 
praying for the likeness; to take our place face to 
face with Jesus, gazing, loving, believing that the 
wonderful vision of that Crucified One is the sure 



5 2 MARCH. 

promise of what we can be ; then putting aside all 
that can distract, in stillness of soul, silent unto 
God, just to allow the blessed Spirit as the light of 
God to do the work. 

31st.— Himself for us; us for Himself; an entire 
exchange ; a perfect union ; a complete identity ; in 
interest and purpose. Himself for us, as Saviour; 
us^ for Himself, still as Saviour, like Him and for 
Him to continue on earth, the work which He 
began. 



APRIL. 

SPIRIT OF CHRIST. 

ist. — Each of us must learn that there is a Ho- 
liest of All, in that temple, which he himself is ; the 
secret place of the Most High within us must be- 
come the central truth in our temple worship. This 
must be the meaning of our confession: "I believe 
in the Holy Ghost/' 

2nd. — Love every believer not for the sake of 
what in him is in sympathy with thee or pleasing to 
thee, but for the sake of the Spirit of the Father 
which is in him. 

3rd. — The fuller the Spirit's indwelling and the 
mightier His working is, the more truly spiritual 
your being becomes, the more will self sink away, 
and the Spirit of Christ use you in building up and 
building together believers into an habitation of 
God. 

4th. — The trust in gifts and knowledge in 
soundness of creed and earnestness of work, the 
satisfaction in forms and services leaves the flesh in 
full vigor, not crucified with Christ and so the 



54 APRIL. 

Spirit is not free to work out true holiness in the 
Christian or a life in the power of Christ's love. 

5th. — To be a Christian just means to have the 
Spirit of Christ, to have His love and to have been 
made by Him a fountain of Love, springing up 
and flowing out in streams of living water. We 
know not what the Spirit is meant to be in us, be- 
cause we have not accepted Him for what the 
Master gave. 

6th. — It is only where the soul gives the Spirit 
the precedence it claims, and self is denied to make 
way for God, that selfishness will be conquered, and 
love toward our brother flow from love toward God. 

7th. — Not the amount, or the clearness, or the in- 
terest of the Bible knowledge received will decide 
the blessing and the power that it brings but the 
measure of real dependence on the Holy Spirit. 

8th. — It is not the power of intellect, it is not even 
the earnest desire to know the truth, that fits a man 
for the Spirit's teaching, it is a life yielded to Him 
in waiting dependence and full obedience to be made 
spiritual, that receives the spiritual wisdom and un- 
derstanding. 

9th. — Believe! it is not enough that the light of 
Christ shines on you in the Word, the light of the 
Spirit must shine in you. 



APRIL. 55 

i oth. — It is the very work of the Spirit specially 
to unite Himself with what is material, to lift it up 
into His own Spirit nature, and so to develop what 
will be the highest type of perfection — a spiritual 
body. 

nth. — In the Father, we have the unseen God, 
the Author of all. In the Son, God revealed and 
brought nigh. In the Spirit of God we have the 
Indwelling God; the Power of God dwelling in 
human body and working in it what the Father and 
the Son have for us. 

1 2th. — As all the Word of God is given by the 
Spirit of God, so each word must be interpreted to 
us by that same Spirit. Not in the Spirit without 
or with but little of the Word, not in the Word 
without or with but little of the Spirit, but in the 
Word and Spirit, both dwelling richly within us and 
both yielded to in implicit obedience, is our assur- 
ance of safety in the path of the Spirit's guidance. 

13th. — The Holy Spirit is the Church's power for 
all her work and her missions, and that power will 
only act mightily as the number increases of indi- 
vidual believers, who give themselves to be pos- 
sessed, to be led, to be used of the Spirit of Christ. 

14th. — When the Holy Spirit convinces us of the 
sin of the world, His work bears two marks. The 



56 APRIL. 

one is the sacrifice of self, in the jealousy for God 
and His honor, combined with the deep and tender 
grief for the guilty. The other is a deep, strong 
faith in the possibility and power of deliverance. 

15th. — God looks upon the world in His holiness, 
hating its sin with such an infinite hatred, and lov- 
ing it with such a love, that He gives His Son, and 
the Son gives His life to destroy sin and set its 
captives free. 

Not in what we know, but in what we are does 
the Spirit begin His work. And the teaching of the 
Spirit begins not in word or thought, but in Power. 

16th. — There is no way of knowing the light but 
by being in it and using it. There is no way of 
knowing the Holy Spirit but by possessing Him 
and being possessed of Him. To have Him in us, 
doing His work and giving us His fellowship, this 
is the path the Master opens, when He says: "Ye 
know Him, for He shall be in you." 

17th. — However little we see or feel, let us be- 
lieve. The Divine is always first known by believ- 
ing. As we continue believing, we shall be pre- 
pared to know and to see. 

Gather together all the Word says of the Spirit. 
His indwelling and His work, and hide it in your 



APRIL. 57 

heart. Be determined to accept of nothing but what 
the Word teaches, but also to accept heartily of all 
it teaches. 

1 8th. — God is to be found nowhere but in His 
will. His will in Christ accepted, and done by us, 
with the heart in which it is done, is the home of the 
Holy Spirit. 

Even now, day by day, we are to live in His 
glory. The Holy Spirit is able to be to us just as 
much as we are willing to have of Him and of the 
life of the glorified Lord. 

19th. — Let us come under the hand of our Lord, 
covered by His hand with only one purpose — to 
have all our work covered in the hand of our God. 
There is the secret of life. 

The Holy Ghost never looked for His own glory, 
never spoke of His own: His only purpose is to glo- 
rify Christ. It was not obligation but the yearning 
of His heart, this decrease. 

20th. — Learn to look on Jesus and more and 
more you will find that Jesus by His look, is taking 
your wandering look under the direction of the 
Holy Ghost. By and by it will become the very 
attitude of your soul and you could do anything 
more easily than distrust Jesus. 



58 APRIL. 

Behind the Valley of Death there is abundance 
of life, and the moment you give up all things, let- 
ting yourself go in the arms of Jesus, death will 
lose its terror. 

2 1 st. — If you want unity in your daily life, don't 
seek life ; never will you find life if you are seeking 
for it. Life is only when you have your own life. 

I am too happy not to put every day, every hour 
in the hands of my Heavenly Father; too happy 
ever again to take into my hand the threads of my 
life. 

22nd. — A seed contains life hidden in the most 
dead, unlikely looking form possible, and this seed, 
with its hidden life, must itself again be hidden under 
the earth. So the Kingdom of Heaven comes to us 
in the seed of the Word. It must be hidden not in 
the thoughts that we can recognize and watch over, 
but deeper down, in the mysterious depths of the 
Spirit. There Christ who is in the unseen Spirit 
life of the Father, finds the unseen depths of our 
Spirit life and enters there. He is Himself the Liv- 
ing Word, the Living Seed, the Spirit is the life of 
the seed. 

23rd. — It is often only as we suffer in the flesh 
that the quickening of the Spirit is experienced. 
All leading claims following, it is easily understood 



APRIL. 59 

that to enjoy the leading of the Spirit demands a 
very teachable, followsome mind. 

Even as beautiful flames on earth are nothing 
but the wood or coal transformed by the fire into 
its own light natue, so the fire of God cleanses and 
beautifies by filling the heart with its own heavenly 
glory. (Miscellaneous .) 

In all our life process we must be made like unto 
Him. He received His life from God; He lived it 
in dependence upon God; He gave up His life to 
God; He was raised from the dead by God; He 
lives His life in glory with God. (Miscellaneous). 

24th. — What a blessed solution God gives to all 
our questions and our difficulties when He says: 
"My child, Christ has gone through it all for thee!" 
He has wrought out a new nature that can trust God, 
and Christ the Living One in heaven will live in 
thee, and enable thee to live that life of trust. (Mis- 
cellaneous.) 

25th. — Just as much as Christ was my substitute 
who died for me, just so much He is my head in 
Whom and with Whom I die. Just as He lives for 
me to intercede, He lives in me to carry out and 
perfect His life. By His death, He proved that He 
possessed life only to hold it, and to spend it, for 
God. (Miscellaneous.) 



60 APRIL. 

26th. — Ask God to make you willing to believe 
with your heart that to die with Christ is the only 
way to live in Him. Jesus lived every day in the 
prospect of the Cross, and we in the power of His 
victorious life, being made conformable to His 
death, must rejoice every day in going down with 
Him into death. (Miscellaneous.) 

27th. — The acorn died and the tree appeared. In 
the very grave, where the acorn died, it stood there 
stretching its roots deeper and deeper into the earth, 
yet growing higher, stronger, broader, more beau- 
tiful. All the fruit and all the foliage it owes to 
that grave in which its roots are cast and kept. 
Even so, Christ owes everything to His grave, and 
we too owe everything to the grave of Jesus. Mis- 
cellaneous.) 

28th. — Christ lost nothing by giving up His life 
unto the Father. If you want the glory and the life 
of God to come upon you, it is in the grave of utter 
helplessness that that life of glory will be born. 
(Miscellaneous.) 

The secret of being in nothing behind the chief- 
test Apostles, in nothing behind even Paul himself, 
is this: "I am nothing!" Why? "Because God 
hath chosen the things that are not." Why? "That 
no flesh should glory in His presence, He that glo- 
rieth, let him glory in the Lord." To be nothing is 
the only way to let God be all. (Miscellaneous.) 



APRIL. 6l 

29th. — Jesus came to deliver man from sin and 
sickness that He might make known the love of the 
Father. In His actions, in the teaching of the dis- 
ciples, in the work of the Holy Spirit, and in the 
words of the Apostles pardon and healing are always 
to be found together. To receive healing it is 
necessary to begin by confession of sin and the pur- 
pose to live a holy life. This is why those who re- 
ceive healing receive at the same time new spiritual 
blessing, feel more closely united to the Lord Jesus, 
and learn to love and serve Him better. The re- 
deemed may always cry: "Bless the Lord, O my 
soul, who forgiveth all thine iniquities, who healeth 
all thy diseases." Psa. 103:3. (Miscellaneous.) 

30th. — The preaching of the gospel and the heal- 
ing of the sick are given as evident proof of Christ's 
mission as the Messiah. Matt. 11:5. Jesus, who 
took upon Him the soul and body of man, delivers 
both in equal measure from the consequences of 
sin. When Christ speaks of sickness it is always as 
of an evil caused by sin and Satan. He declared that 
every disciple would have to bear his cross. (Matt. 
16:24), but He never taught one sick person to re- 
sign himself to be sick. Sin in the soul and sickness 
in the body, both bear witness to the power of Satan, 
and "The Son of Man was manifested that He might 
destroy the works of the devil." 1 John 3:8, Job 
2:7, Lu. 13:16, Acts 10:38, Heb. 2:14, Gen. 1:31. 
(Miscellaneous.) 



MAY. 

WITH CHRIST IN THE SCHOOL OF PRAYER. 

ist. — In our blessed Priest-King, Jesus Christ, 
the kingly power is founded on the priestly, "He is 
able to save to the uttermost, because He ever liveth 
to make intercession/' In us, His priests and kings, 
it is no otherwise. 

As long as we look on prayer chiefly as the means 
of maintaining our own Christian Kfe, we shall not 
know fully what it is meant to be. 

Jesus never taught His disciples how to preach, 
only how to pray. To know how to speak to God 
is more than knowing how to speak to man. Not 
power with men, but power with God is the first 
thing. Do not be thinking of how little you have 
to bring God, but of how much He wants to give 
you. 

2nd. — Not on the strong or the fervent feeling 
with which I pray does the blessing depend, but 
upon the love and the power of the Father to whom 
I entrust my needs. 

The knowledge of God's Father-love is the first 



MAY. 63 

and simplest but also the last and highest lesson in 
the school of prayer. The sooner I learn to forget 
myself in the desire that He may be glorified, the 
richer will the blessing be that prayer will bring 
to myself. No one ever loses by what he sacrifices 
for the Father. 

3rd. — Because the will of God is the glory of 
heaven, the doing of it is the blessedness of heaven. 
As the will is done, the kingdom of heaven comes 
into the heart, and wherever faith has accepted 
the Father's will. The surrender to, and the prayer 
for a life of heaven-like obedience, is the spirit of 
childlike prayer. 

As a child has to prove a sum to be correct, so 
the proof that we have prayed aright is the answer. 
In prayer and its answer the interchange of love 
between the Father and His child takes place. 
Man's prayer on earth and God's answer in heaven 
are meant for each other. A life marked by daily 
answer to prayer is the proof of our spiritual ma- 
turity. 

4th. — If the child is to know and understand his 
father; if as he grows up, he is to enter into all his 
will and plans ; if he is to have his highest joy in the 
father, and the father in him, he must be of one 
mind and spirit with him. And so it is impossible 
to conceive of God bestowing any higher gift on 



64 MAY. 

His child than this, His own Spirit. God is what 
He is through His Spirit ; the Spirit is the very life 
of God. 

It is when we give ourselves to be a bless- 
ing that we can especially count on the blessings of 
God. The righteous man who is the friend of the 
poor is very specially the friend of God. This gives 
wonderful liberty in prayer. Every believer is a 
laborer ; not one of God's children who has not been 
redeemed for service, and has not his work waiting. 

5th. — As long as in prayer we just pour out our 
hearts in a multitude of petitions without taking 
time to see whether every petition is sent with the 
purpose and expectation of getting an answer, not 
many will reach the mark. 

It is when in distinct matters we have in faith 
claimed and received answers, that our more gen- 
eral prayers will be believing and effectual. 

As we think how all He is and has, how He Him- 
self is our life, we feel assured that we have but to 
ask, and He will be delighted to take us up into 
closer fellowship with Himself, and teach us to pray 
even as He prays. A life in God's infinite Father- 
liness and continual answers to prayer are insepa- 
rable, but the child who only wants to know the 
love of the Father when he has something to ask, 
will be disappointed. 



MAY. 65 

Faith is nothing but the purpose of the will rest- 
ing on God's word, and saying: I must have it. To 
believe truly is to will firmly. 

6th. — Believe that you have received now, while 
praying, the thing you ask for. It may only be 
later that you shall see what you believe ; but now, 
without seeing, you are to believe that it has been 
given you of the Father in heaven. 

Faith says most confidently, I have received the 
promise. Patience perseveres in prayer until the 
gift bestowed in heaven is seen on earth. Believe 
that ye have received, and ye shall have! 

Between the have received in heaven, and the 
shall have on earth, believe ; believing praise and 
prayer is the link. 

7th. — Let faith look to God more than the thing 
promised: The cure of a feeble faith is alone to 
be found in the invigoration of our whole spiritual 
life by intercourse with God. Learn to believe in 
God, to take hold of God, to let God take possession 
of thy life, and it will be easy to take hold of the 
promise. He that knows and trusts God finds it 
easy to trust the promise too. 

8th. — Men of strong faith are men of much 
prayer. It is in the dying to self which much 
prayer implies, in closer union to Jesus, that the 



66 MAY. 

spirit of faith will come in power. Faith needs 
prayer for its full growth. 

It is only in a life of temperance and self-denial 
that there will be the heart or the strength to pray 
much. 

Without voluntary separation even from what 
is lawful, no one will attain power in prayer. 

9th. — Not according to what I try to be when 
praying, but what I am when not praying, is my 
prayer dealt with by God. 

Nothing would be more unnatural than that the 
children of a family should always meet their father 
separately, but never in the united expression of 
their desires or their love. It is in the union and 
fellowship of believers that the Spirit can manifest 
His full power. 

10th. — Man, in his spiritual nature, is under the 
law of gradual growth that reigns in all created 
life. It is only in the path of development that he 
can reach his divine destiny. The Father alone 
knows the moment when the soul or the Church is 
ripened to that fullness of faith in which it can 
really take and keep the blessing. As a father who 
longs to have his only child home from school, and 
vet waits patiently till the time of training is com- 
pleted, so it is with God and His children: He is 



MAY. 67 

the Long-suffering One, and answers speedily. 

nth. — Prayer not only teaches and strengthens 
to work: work teaches and strengthens to pray. 
Faith is obedience at home and looking to the 
Master: obedience is faith going out to do His 
will. 

As a Christian grows in grace and in knowledge 
of the Lord Jesus, he is often surprised to find how 
the words of God grow too, in the new and deeper 
meaning with which they come to him. 

Just as far as we listen to the voice and language 
that God speaks, and in the words of God, receive 
His thoughts, His mind, His life, into our heart, 
we shall learn to speak in the voice and language 
that God hears. 

1 2th. — The Old Testament Saints spake in 
prayer. If the word was a command, they simply 
did as the Lord had spoken: their life was fel- 
lowship with God, the interchange of word and 
thought. What God spoke they heard and did ; 
what they spoke God heard and did. 

Let us believe that we can know if our prayer be 
according to God's will. Let us yield our heart to 
have the.word of the Father dwell richly there. Let 
us live day by day with the anointing which teach- 
eth all things, and we shall soon understand how 



68 MAY. 

the Father's love longs that the child should know 
His will, and should, in the confidence that that 
will includes all that His power and love have 
promised to do, know too that He hears the petit- 
ions which we ask of Him. 

13th. — God wills a great deal of blessing to His 
people, which never comes to them. He wills it 
most earnestly, but they do not will it, and it can- 
not come to them. 

Our true aim must not be to work much, but to 
pray much and then to work enough for the power 
and blessing obtained in prayer to find its way 
through us to men. 

Because we do not abide in Christ as He would 
have us, the Church is so impotent in presence of 
the infidelity and worldliness and heathendom, in 
the midst of which the Lord is able to make her 
more than conqueror. Let us believe that He 
means what He promises and accept the condemna- 
tion the confession implies. 

THE MINISTRY OF INTERCESSION. 

14th. — The measure of believing, continued 
prayer, will be the measure of the Spirit'? working 
in the Church. Direct, definite, determined prayer, 
is what we need. The measure of God's giving 



MAY. 69 

the Spirit is our asking. He gives as a father to 
him who asks as a child. 

There is nothing in honest business, when it is 
kept in its place as entirely subordinate to the 
kingdom, which must ever be first, that need pre- 
vent fellowship with God. 

15th. — A much-praying minister will receive an 
entrance into God's will, he would otherwise know 
nothing of; will be brought to praying people 
where he does not expect them ; will receive bless- 
ing above all he asks or thinks. It is prayer that 
is the only secret of true Church extension ; that is 
guided from heaven to find and send forth God- 
called and God-empowered men. 

The attempt to pray constantly for ourselves, must 
be a failure ; it is in intercession for others that our 
faith and love and perseverance will be aroused, and 
that the power of the Spirit be found, which can fit 
us for saving men. 

16th. — Intercession is the most perfect form of 
prayer: it is the prayer Christ ever liveth to pray 
on His throne. 

It is as love of our profession and work, delight 
in thoroughness and diligence, sink away in the 
tender compassion of Christ, that love will compel 



70 MAY. 

us to prayer, because we cannot rest in our work 
if souls are not saved. True love must pray. 

Just as the heaven our natural eye can see, is one 
great ocean of sunshine, with its light and heat- 
giving beauty and fruitfulness to earth, Scripture 
shows us God's true heaven, filled with all spiritual 
blessings, divine light and love and life, heavenly 
joy and peace and power, all shining down upon us. 

17th. — If we will but believe in God and His 
faithfulness, intercession will become to us the very 
first thing we take refuge in when we seek blessing 
for others and the very last thing for which we can- 
not find time. 

Prayer opens the way for God Himself to do His 
work in us and through us. Let our chief work, as 
God's messengers, be intercession: in it we secure 
the presence and pow T er of God to go with us. 

Let us confess before God, our lack of prayer. 
Let us admit that the lack of faith, of which it is 
the proof, is the symptom of a life that is not spirit- 
ual, that is yet all too much under the power of self 
and the flesh and the world. 

18th. — In all ages men have prayed under a sense 
that there were difficulties in the heavenly world to 
overcome. As they pleaded with God, and in that 
persevering supplication were brought into union 



MAY. 71 

with His will, and of faith that could take hold of 
Him, the hinderances in themselves and in heaven, 
were together overcome. As God conquered them, 
they conquered God. As God prevails over us, we 
prevail with God. 

Faith in a prayer-hearing God, will make a 
prayer-loving Christian. 

Where our life is right, we shall know how to 
pray so as to please God, and prayer will secure the 
answer. 

The man who is ready to risk all for God, can 
count upon God to do all for him. It is as men live 
that they pray. It is the life that prays. 

19th. — The more we pray and the more conscious 
we become of our unfitness to pray in power, the 
more we shall be urged and helped to press on to- 
ward the secret of power in prayer — a life abiding in 
Christ, entirely at His disposal. This marks off the 
whole-hearted believer from the worldling and 
worldly Christians around him: he lives consciously 
hidden in the secret of God's presence. 

When the pressure of work for Christ is allowed 
to be the excuse for our not finding time to seek and 
secure His own presence and power in it, as our 
chief need, it surely proves that there is no right 
sense of our absolute dependence upon God, no 



J 2 MAY. 

true entrance into the heavenly, altogether other- 
worldly character of our incision and aims, no full 
surrender to and delight in Jesus Christ Himself. 

20th. — When once we see how there is to be 
nothing of our own for a single moment, and that 
it is to be all Christ, moment by moment, and learn 
to accept it from Him and trust Him for it, the life 
of Christ becomes the health of our soul. Health 
is nothing but life in its normal, undisturbed action. 
Christ gives us health by giving us Himself as our 
life; so He becomes our strength for our walk. 
They that wait on the Lord shall walk and not faint, 
because Christ is now the strength of their life. 

2 1 st. — The more heartily we enter into the mind 
of our blessed Lord and set ourselves simply just to 
think about prayer as He thought, the more surely 
will His words be as living seeds. They will grow 
and produce in us their fruit, — a life and practice 
exactly corresponding to the divine truth they con- 
tain. 

A Christian may often have very earnest desires 
for spiritual blessings. But alongside of these there 
are other desires in his daily life, occupying a large 
place in his interests and affections. The spiritual 
desires are not all-absorbing. He wonders that his 
prayer is not heard. It is simply that God wants 
the whole heart. "The Lord, thy God, is one Lord, 



MAY. 73 

therefore thou shalt love the Lord thy God with 
thy whole heart/' 

22nd. — Prayer is just the breathing of the Spirit 
in us ; power in prayer comes from the power of the 
Spirit in us, waited on and trusted in. Failure in 
prayer comes from feebleness of the Spirit's work 
in us. To pray aright, the life of the Spirit must be 
right in us. 

As long as we measure our power for praying 
aright and perseveringly, by what we feel, or think 
we can accomplish, we shall be discouraged when 
we hear of how much we ought to pray. But when 
we quietly believe that, in the midst of all our con- 
scious weakness, the Holy Spirit, as a Spirit of 
Supplication, is dwelling within us, for the very 
purpose of enabling us to pray in such manner and 
measure as God would have us, our hearts will be 
filled with hope. 

23rd. — The Spirit can pray in no other way in us, 
than as He lives in us. It is only as we give our- 
selves to the Spirit living and praying in us that 
the glory of the prayer-hearing God, and the ever- 
blessed and most effectual mediation of the Son, 
can be known by us in their power. 

When we realize what time Christ spent in prayer, 
and how the great events of His life were all con- 
nected with special prayer, we learn the necessity 



74 MAY. 

of absolute dependence on and unceasing direct 

communication with the heavenly world, if we are 

to live a heavenly life, or to exercise heavenly 
power around us. 

24th. — If any one could have been satisfied with 
always living and working in the Spirit of prayer, 
it would have been our Master. But He could not ; 
He needed to have His supplies replenished by con- 
tinual and long continued seasons of prayer. 

Christ was what He taught. All His teaching 
was just the revelation of how He lived, and — praise 
God — of the life He was to lead in us. 

Even as Christ obtained His right of prevailing 
intercession by His giving Himself a sacrifice to 
God for men, and through it receives the blessings 
He dispenses, so, if we have truly with Christ given 
ourselves to God for men, we share His right of 
intercession, and are able to obtain the powers of 
the heavenly world for them, too. 

25th. — Tell every one who is master of his own 
time, that he is as the angels, free to tarry before 
the throne and then go out and minister to the 
heirs of salvation. 

We are frequently in danger of looking to what 
God has done and is doing, and to count on that as 
the pledge that He will at once do more. And all 



MAY. 75 

the time it may be true that He is blessing us up 
to the measure of our faith or self-sacrifice, and can- 
not give larger measure until there has been a new 
discovery and confession of what is hindering Him. 

26th. — Men would fain have a revival as the out- 
growth of their agencies and progress. God's way 
is the opposite: it is out of death, acknowledged as 
the desert of sin, confessed as utter helplessness, 
that He revives. He revives the heart of the con- 
trite one. 

When earnest, godly workers allow, against their 
better will, the spiritual to be crowded out by in- 
cessant occupation and the fatigue it brings, it must 
be because the spiritual life is not sufficiently strong 
in them, to bid the lever stand aside till the pres- 
ence of God in Christ and the power of the Spirit, 
have been fully secured. 

27th. — It was when the friend at midnight, in 
answer to his prayer, had received from Another as 
much as he needed, that he could supply his hungry 
friend. It was the intercession, going out and im- 
portuning, that was the difficult work; returning 
home with his rich supply to impart, was easy, joy- 
ful work. This is Christ's divine order for all thy 
work, my brother: First come in utter poverty, 
every day, and get from God the blessing in inter- 
cession, go then, rejoicingly to impart it. 



76 MAY. 

28th. — Our Lord gave His disciples, on His 
resurrection day, the Holy Spirit, to enable them 
to wait for the full outpouring on the day of Pente- 
cost. It is only in the power of the Spirit already 
in us, acknowledged and yielded to, that we can 
pray for His fuller manifestation. Say to the Father, 
it is the Spirit of His Son in you, is urging you to 
plead His promise. 

Prayer is not only wishing or asking, but believ- 
ing and accepting. 

29th. — In the last night Christ asked three 
things for His disciples : that they might be kept as 
those who are not of the world ; that they might be 
sanctified ; that they might be one in love. You can- 
not do better than pray as Jesus prayed. Ask for 
God's people that they may be kept separate from 
the world and its spirit; that they, by the Holy 
Spirit, may live as those who are not of the world. 

The utterance of our wish gives point to the 
transaction in which we are engaged with God, and 
so awakens faith and expectation. Be very definite 
in your petitions, so as to know what answer you 
may look for. 

30th. — The future of the church and world de- 
pends, to an extent we little conceive, on the edu- 
cation of the day. The church may be seeking to 
evangelize the heathen and be giving up her own 



may. yy 

children to secular and materialistic influences. Pray 
for schools and colleges, and that the church may 
realize and fulfil its momentous duty of caring for 
its children. 

Beware in your prayer, above everything, of 
limiting God, not only by unbelief, but by fancying 
that you know what He can do. Expect unex- 
pected things, above all that we ask or think. Each 
time that you intercede, be quiet first and worship 
God in His glory. 

The same censer brings the prayer of the saints 
before God and casts fire upon the earth. The 
prayers that go up to heaven, have their share in the 
history of this earth. 

31st. — Pray for the Jews. Their return to the God 
of their fathers stands connected, in a way we can- 
not tell, w T ith wonderful blessing to the church, and 
with the coming of our Lord Jesus. 

What numbers of Bibles are being circulated. 
What numbers of sermons on the Bible are being 
preached. What numbers of Bibles being read in 
home and school. How little blessing when it 
comes "in word" only; what Divine blessing and 
power when it comes "in the Holy Ghost," when it 
is preached "with the Holy Ghost sent forth from 
heaven." 



78 MAY. 

All the powers of evil seek to hinder us in prayer. 
Prayer is a conflict with opposing forces. It needs 
the whole heart and all our strength. May God 
give us grace to strive in prayer until we prevail. 



JUNE. 

THE NEW LIFE. 



ist. — The benefit of meetings for bringing and 
reading aloud texts on a point previously an- 
nounced is very great. This practice leads to the 
searching of God's Word, as even preaching does 
not. 

2nd. — Read a book to understand the good and 
then see if you receive benefit from the thoughts 
expressed. Read to see if it is really in accordance 
with God's Word. Read to find out the corre- 
sponding places, not in the Bible, but in your own 
life. Know if your life has been in harmony with 
the New Life; direct your life for the future en- 
tirely according to God's Word. 

3rd. — One verse chosen to meet our needs, read 
ten times and then laid up in the heart, is better than 
ten verses read once. Only so much of the Word 
as I actually receive and inwardly appropriate for 
myself is food for my soul. 

4th. — With God, speaking and doing always go 
together: "Shall He say it and not do it?" The 



80 JUNE. 

deed follows the word. I hear what God has said. 
I take time to lodge in my heart the word promised, 
I await the fulfilment. God promises — I believe — 
God fulfills: that is the secret of the new life. 

5th. — The Christian has only to believe; God 
will look to the fulfilling. He thinks that he must 
have a great power to exercise such a great faith. 
You must not bring this mighty faith to get the 
Word fulfilled; the Word brings you this faith. 
"The Word is living and powerful." "Faith is by 
the Word." Keep yourselves occupied with the 
Word and give it time. It will work in you a faith 
strong and able for anything. 

6th. — If I trust in the Word and in the living 
God His commandment will work in me desire and 
power for obedience. When I weigh and hold fast 
the command, it works the desire and the will to 
obey; it urges strongly the conviction that I can 
certainly do what my Father says. The Word, as 
the command of the living God who loves me, is 
my power. 

7th. — This is the love of God ; not that He gives 
us something, but someone — a living person — not 
one or another blessing, but Him in whom is all life 
and blessing — Jesus Himself. The whole of salva- 
tion consists in this: to have, to enjoy Jesus, "He 
that hath the Son hath life." 




>sb:* . 






mkm 




JUNE. 8l 

8th. — God gives in a wonderful way: from the 
heart, completely for nothing, to the unworthy. 
And He gives effectually. What He gives He will 
really make entirely our possession. To take Jesus 
and to hold Him fast and use Him when received, 
is our great work. And that taking is nothing but 
trusting. He is mine with all that He has. 

9th. — It was in His great love that the Father 
gave the Son. It was out of love that Jesus gave 
Himself. The taking, the having of Jesus, is the 
entrance to a life in the love of God: this is the 
highest life. Through faith we must press into 
love, and dwell there. 

10th. — Keep back no single sin. Keep back no 
single power. To save is to free from sin. Wait 
not till you enter into temptation, but let your life 
beforehand be always through Jesus. 

11. — The continued indeterminate confession of 
sin does more harm than good. It is much better 
to say to God that you have nothing to confess, 
than to confess you know not what. 

12th. — The secret of progress in the service of 
God is a strong yearning to become free from every 
sin, a hunger and thirst after righteousness. The 
Spirit of God is named the Holy Spirit because He 
makes us holy. Being right with God is followed 
by doing right. 



82 JUNE. 

13th. — You must love, although you do not feel 
the least love. It is not in your feeling, but in 
faith, that the Spirit in you is the power of your 
will to work in you all that the Father bids you. 
Therefore, although you feel absolutely no love to 
your enemy, say "In faith in the hidden working 
of the Spirit in my heart, I do love him." 

14th. — The nearer we are to God, the less we are 
in ourselves, but the stronger we are in Him. The 
more I see of God, the less I become, the deeper 
is my confidence in Him. To become lowly, let 
God fill eye and heart. Where God is all, there is 
no time or place for man. 

15th. — You often pray and strive against a sin: 
although this is done with God's help you would be 
the person who would overcome. No! "the battle 
is not yours, but God's." Ask only: "What is my 
Jesus able to do?" What you really trust Him with, 
He is able to keep. You can trust the power of 
Jesus, if you know that He is yours if you hold con- 
verse with Him as your friend. 

16th. — "The Lord must help me to overcome 
sin:" the expression is altogether outside of the 
New Testament. The grace of God in the soul does 
not become a help to us. He will do everything. 
When you surrender anything to the Lord for keep- 
ing, take heed that you give it wholly into His 



JUNE. 83 

hands ; and that you leave it there. He will carry 
out your case gloriously. 

17th. — The complaint about weakness is often 
nothing else than an apology for our idleness. 
There is power to be obtained in Christ for those 
who will take the pains to have it. Strength is for 
work. He who would be strong simply to be pious, 
will not be so. He who in his weakness begins to 
work for the Lord, shall become strong. 

18th. — Believing right in opposition to what we 
see, gives salvation. The unbelief that would see 
shall not see; the faith that will not see, but has 
enough in God, shall see the glory of God. Feeling 
always seeks something in itself; faith keeps itself 
occupied with what Jesus is. 

19th. — Our work every day and the whole day is 
to believe. Out of faith come all blessings and 
powers, also the victory for overcoming. The bless- 
ing of God includes in it the power of life for multi- 
plication, for expansion, for communication. In 
the Scriptures blessing and multiplication go to- 
gether. Blessing always includes the power to bless 
others. 

20th. — For missions Jesus left the throne of 
heaven. The heathen are His inheritance. In 
heathendom the power of Satan has been estab- 



84 JTXNE. 

lished. Jesus must have Himself vindicated as the 
conqueror. The Lord has made Himself depend- 
ent upon His body to do His work. It is the work 
for which the Holy Spirit was given. See this in 
the leading of the Spirit vouchsafed to Peter and 
Barnabas and Saul. Missionary work brings bless- 
ing on the church. It rouses to heroic deeds of 
faith and self-denial. It has furnished the most 
glorious instances of the wondrous power of the 
Lord. In love for missionary work you will learn 
to cleave to God and the Word ; you will be drawn 
into prayer 

2 1 st. — Gladness in God is the strongest proof 
that I have in God what satisfies me. Gladness is 
the token of the truth and the worth of obedience, 
showing I have pleasure in the will of God. The 
light of God's countenance gives the Christian his 
gladness: in fellowship with his Lord he always 
will be happy: the love of the Father shines like 
the sun upon His children. Sin makes dark; un- 
belief also makes dark, for it turns us from Him, 
who alone is the light. 

22nd. — Gladness is hindered by ignorance, when 
we do not understand God and His love and the 
blessedness of His service; by double-heartedness, 
when we are not willing to give up everything for 
Jesus, 



JTENTE. 85 

23rd. — Do not seek gladness; in that case you 
will not find it, because you are seeking feeling. 
But seek Jesus, follow Jesus, believe in Jesus, and 
gladness shall be added to you. 

24th. — The will of God is as perfect as He Him- 
self: let us not be afraid to surrender ourselves to 
it: no one suffers loss by deeming the will of God 
unconditionally good. 

The sure confidence of an answer is the secret of 
powerful praying. For a blessed prayer-meeting 
there must be love and unity among the suppliants, 
agreement upon the definite object that is desired; 
the coming together in the name of Jesus and the 
consciousness of His presence. According to your 
conviction of the nearness of God will be the power 
of your prayer. 

25th. — When the Lord Jesus manifests His great 
grace to a soul in redeeming it, He desires that the 
world should see and know it: He would be known 
and honored as its proprietor. Apart from this 
public confession surrender is but half-hearted. 

26th. — Conformity to the world can be overcome 
by nothing but conformity to Jesus. Conformity 
to the world is strengthened especially by inter- 
course with it: it is in intercourse with Jesus that we 
shall adopt His mode of thinking, His disposition, 



86 JITNE. 

His manners. This is the spirit of the world: to 
seek one's self and the visible. The Spirit of Jesus: 
to live for God and the things that are invisible. 

27th. — Do not use the day of rest only as a day 
for the public observance of divine worship. In the 
church you have the ordinances of preaching, united 
prayer and praise, to keep you occupied. It is es- 
pecially in private personal intercourse that God 
can bless and sanctify you. 

28th. — The lessons of the Supper are many. It 
is a feast of remembrance ; a feast of reconciliation ; 
a covenant feast; a feast of hope. But all these 
separate thoughts are only subordinate parts of the 
principal element: the living Jesus would give Him- 
self to us in the most inward union. 

29th. — There is but one Hebrew word for "obey- 
ing voice'' and "hearing voice:" w T hen I learn the 
will of God, not in the words of a man or a book, 
but from God Himself, I shall surely believe what 
is promised and do what is commanded. The Holy 
Spirit is the voice of God : when we hear the living 
voice obedience becomes easy. 

30th. — Read the Word with a searching of the 
Scriptures. The best explanation of the Bible is 
the Bible itself. Take three or four texts upon a 



JITNE. 87 

point and compare them. See wherein they agree 
and wherein they differ; where they say the same 
thing or again something else. Let the Word of 
God be cleared up and confirmed by what He said 
at another time on the same subject. The sacred 
writers use this method of instruction with the 
Scriptures. 



JULY. 

HOLY IN CHRIST. 

ist. — The secret of the life of holiness comes to 
those who seek it not, but only seek Jesus. Let all 
learn to trust in Jesus and to rejoice in Him even 
though their experience be not what they would 
wish. He will make us holy. But whether we 
have entered the blessed life of faith in Jesus as our 
sanctification, or are still longing for it from afar, 
we all need one thing, the simple believing and 
obedient acceptance of each word that our God has 
spoken. 

2nd. — "Be ye holy, for I am holy." It is as if 
God said: — Holiness is my blessedness, and my 
glory; without this you cannot see Me or enjoy 
Me. There is nothing higher to be conceived; I 
invite you to share with Me in it; I invite you to 
likeness with Myself: "Be ye holy, for I am holy" 

3rd. — Holiness is not something we do or attain, 
it is the communication of the Divine Life, the in- 
breathing of the Divine Nature; the power of the 
Divine Presence resting on us. The Holy One 



JULY. 89 

calls us to Himself that He may make ul holy in 
possessing Himself. It is because the call to holi- 
ness comes from the God of infinite Power and Love 
that we may have the confidence: — we can be holy. 

4th. — The nature of light is the same, whether in 
the sun or in a candle; the nature of holiness re- 
mains unchanged whether it be God or man in 
whom it dwells. The more carefully we listen to 
God's voice and let it sink into our hearts, the more 
will all human standards fall away and only the 
words be heard, "Holy, as I am holy/' 

5th. — We are holy in Christ Jesus. Would we 
but believe, how God's light would shine and fill 
our hearts with joy and love. Let us fear our own 
thoughts and crucify our own wisdom. Let us give 
ourselves up to receive, in the power of the life of 
God Himself, working in us by the Holy Spirit, 
that which is deeper and truer than human thought, 
Christ Himself as our holiness. 

6th. — As the revelation of the Holy One of old 
was a very slow and gradual one, so let us be content 
patiently to follow, step by step, the path of the 
shining light through the Word ; it will shine more 
and more unto the perfect day. 

7th. — All God's teaching about holiness is com- 
prised in three great lessons: — First, a revelation, 



90 JULY. 

"I am holy;" second, a command, "Be ye holy;" 
third, a gift, the link between the two, "Ye are holy 
in Christ." 

8th. — It is the consciousness of God's presence, 
making and keeping us His very own, that works 
the true separateness of the world and its spirit 
from ourselves and our will. It is as this separa- 
tion is prized and persevered in, that the holiness 
of God will enter in and take possession. 

9th. — Because God is a spiritual and invisible 
Being, every revelation of Himself, whether in His 
work, His Word, or His Son, calls for faith. Faith 
is to the soul what the senses are to the body; by 
it alone we enter into communication and contact 
with God. Faith is that meekness of soul which 
waits in stillness to hear, to understand, to accept 
what God says, to receive, to retain, to possess 
what God gives. By faith we allow God to become 
our very life. And because holiness is God's 
highest glory and blessing, it is especially in the life 
of holiness that we need to live by faith alone. 

10th. — True holiness, God's holiness, in us works 
itself out in love, in seeking and loving the unholy 
that they may become holy too. Self-sacrificing 
love is of the very essence of holiness. 

nth. — The will of God must first live in us, if it is 
to be done by us. The way for us to have God's 



JULY. 91 

power in us, is for ourselves to be in His power. 
Put yourself into the power of God; let the Holy 
Spirit dwell within as in His Holy Temple, re- 
vealing the Holy One on the throne; ruling all. 
Holiness is essential to effectual service. 

1 2th. — If in our study of the way of holiness 
there has been awakened in us the desire to accept 
and adore and stand complete in all the will of God, 
let us seek to recognize that will in everything that 
comes on us. The sin of him who vexes us is not 
God's will. But it is God's will that we should be, 
in that position of difficulty, to be tried and tested. 
Such acceptance of the trial turns it into a blessing. 
It will lead on to an ever clearer abiding in all the 
will of God all the day. 

13th. — The more deeply we enter by faith into 
our liberty which we have in Christ, the more joy- 
fully and confidently we present our members to 
God as instruments of righteousness. The liberty 
is not lawlessness, "we are delivered from our ene- 
mies that we may serve Him in righteousness and 
holiness all the days of our life." 

14th. — The secret of true holiness is a very direct 
and personal relation to the Holy One; all the 
teaching through the Word or men made entirely 
dependent on and subordinate to the personal teach- 
ing of the Holy Ghost. 



92 JULY. 

15th. — How many weary workers there are 
mourning the want of power. They have spent 
their strength more in the outer court of work and 
service, than in the inner life of fellowship and faith. 

LOVE MADE PERFECT. 

1 6th. — To think that that everlasting God who 
created heaven and earth should deal with each one 
of us individually, and that it should please Him to 
fill us with that everlasting love in which the 
Father begot the Son and in which the Holy Spirit 
maintains the fellowship between Father and Son. 

17th. — I must not seek for love, but for God, for 
love is the very nature of God. It does not say God 
has love, but God is love, and the love that I need 
is God Himself coming into my heart. 

When the soul is perfected in love, it has such a 
sense of that love that it can rest in it for eternity, 
and though it has as much as it can contain for the 
time being it can always receive more. 

18th. — If we loved others with the love of God 
how much more power there would be in our work, 
how much more intercession, how much we should 
sacrifice everything, our formality, our habits. We 
would do work breathed upon by the love of God. 



JULY. 93 

19th. — It is only the love of God coming in, that 
will cast out self; but self must be brought as a 
criminal to His feet. When God brings a man to 
see all that there is in Christ and to receive Christ 
fully, the power of Christ's death can come upon 
him and he can die to sin, and if he dies to sin, he 
dies to self. 

20th. — The work of God the Father is to beget 
God the Son, and that is the work which goes on 
through eternity. God has nothing for us but Jesus, 
but He is willing to give this — the living Son, born 
afresh into us. When the living Christ dwells in 
us, He will break open the fountain of love within 
us. 

2 1 st. — Love means giving, and giving all. God 
gave His Son to me and with Him gave all ; and 
now, love is — God claiming everything. 

In the light of Christ's love, perfect love means 
that we give up ourselves to pray and to work for 
others. 

The love and the faith of Christ's disciples was 
very defective, yet Christ accepted it as the obedi- 
ence and the faith of loving hearts. So, if we come to 
Christ with our feeble beginnings, He will receive 
our love, and will day by day lead us in the path of 
perfect love and of perfect obedience. 

Just as we must be separate from the world and 



94 JULY. 

joined to Christ in obedience to His Word, so we 

must also be joined to each other. 

BE PERFECT. 

22nd. — A child may be the perfect image of his 
father. There may be a great difference in power 
and yet the resemblance may be so striking that 
everyone notices it; so a child of God, though in- 
finitely less, may yet bear the image of the Father 
so markedly that in His creaturely life, he shall be 
perfect as the Father is in His divine life. 

Man was created simply to show forth God's 
glory, by allowing God to show how completely 
He could reveal His likeness and blessedness in 
man. 

A life that is wholly for God has in all ages been 
accepted by the Father as the mark of the perfect 
man. 

23rd. — The work of the child is very defective 
and yet cause of joy and hope to the father, because 
he sees in it proof of the child's attachment and 
obedience, as well as the pledge of what that spirit 
will do for the child when his intelligence and his 
strength have been increased. The child has 
served the father with a perfect heart, though the 
perfect heart does not at once imply perfect work. 



july. 95 

24th. — If we are to have perfect peace and con- 
fidence we must know that our heart is perfect with 
God. The consciousness of a perfect heart gives 
wonderful power in prayer. 

It is just he who knows most of what it is to be 
perfect in purpose who will pray most to be perfect 
in practice too. Walking before God will ensure 
walking in His commandments. 

Faith expects from God what is beyond all ex- 
pectation. 

25th.— To have God reveal His strength in us, 
to have Him make us strong for life or work, for 
doing or for suffering, our heart must be perfect 
with Him. 

God is Love, who lives not for Himself, but in 
the energy of an infinite life makes His creatures, 
as far as they can possibly receive it, partakers of 
His perfection. 

As little as there can be a ray of the light of day, 
however dull and clouded it be, but what speaks of 
the sun, so little can there be any perfection but 
what is of God. 

26th. — A man may have his heart intent on serv- 
ing God perfectly, and yet he may be unconscious 
of how very imperfect his knowledge of God's will 



g6 july. 

is. The soul that longs to be perfect in the way, 
and in deep consciousness of its need of a Divine 
teaching pleads for it, will not be disappointed. 

27th. — "Let us go on to perfection" means, let 
us go on to know Christ perfectly, to live entirely 
by His heavenly life now He is perfected, to follow 
wholly His earthly life and the path in which He 
reached perfection. 

There must be harmony between the place of 
worship and the worshippers. As He has prepared 
the perfect sanctuary, the Holiest of All, for us, He 
has prepared us for it, too. 

On our part, the surrender to be made perfect 
will be the measure of our capacity to apprehend 
what God has done in Christ. 

28th. — A valuable piece of machinery may be out 
of order. The owner has spent time and trouble in 
vain to put it right. The maker comes : it costs him 
but a moment to remove the hindrance. So the 
soul that has for years wearied itself in the effort 
to do God's will, may often in one moment be de- 
livered from some misapprehension as to what God 
demands or promises, find itself restored, perfected 
for every good thing. What was done in a moment 
becomes the secret of the continuous life, as faith 
each day claims the God that perfects, to do that 
which is well-pleasing in His sight. 



july. 97 

29th. — Jesus Christ was Himself not perfected in 
one day: in Him patience had its perfect work. 
True faith recognizes the need of time and rests in 
God. 

The weakest point in the character of the Chris- 
tian is the measure of His nearness to perfection. 
It is in the little things of daily life that perfection 
is attained and proved. 

30th. — There is the inward perfection that comes 
from growth and development, and the perfection 
which consists in having defects removed and what 
is lacking supplied. Only the former could be used 
of the Lord Jesus, not the latter. Both have refer- 
ence to what God seeks in His children and works 
in them. 

No one will pray for the perfected heart earnestly, 
perseveringly, believingly, until he accepts God's 
Word fully that it is a positive command and an 
immediate duty to be perfect. 

31st. — The consciousness will soon grow strong 
of the utter impossibility of attempting obedience 
in human strength. The faith will grow that the 
word of command was simply meant to draw the 
soul to Him w r ho gives what He asks. 

The will of God is the expression of the divine 
perfection. 



AUGUST. 

DEEPER CHRISTIAN LIFE. 

ist. — Peter wanted to walk like Christ that he 
might get near Christ. He did not say : "Lord, let 
me walk around the sea here/' but, "Let me come 
to Thee." When Peter was in the boat, what had 
he between him and the sea? A couple of planks, 
but when he stepped out upon the water, what had 
he between him and the sea? Not a plank, but the 
word of the Almighty Jesus. 

2nd. — The Christian life compared to Peter walk- 
ing on the waves : — nothing so difficult and impossi- 
ble without Christ. Nothing so blessed and safe 
with Christ. Peter walked back to the boat without 
sinking again. Christ took him by the hand and 
helped him, they were very near to each other, and 
it was the nearness to His Lord that strengthened 
him. It is possible to be far nearer Christ after 
failure than before. 

3rd. — How often we trouble about things, and 
about praying for them, instead of going back to 
the root of things and saying: "Lord, I only crave 



AUGUST. 99 

to be the receptacle of what the will of God means 
for me; of the power and the gift and the love and 
the Spirit of God." 

You never can have too strong a will, but the 
trouble is we do not give that strong will up to 
God, to make it a vessel in which God can and will 
pour His Spirit, so as to fit it to do splendid service 
for Himself. Does not God give us all good gifts 
to enjoy? But the reality of the enjoyment is in the 
giving back. 

4th. — Have I not seen a mother give a piece of 
cake, and the child offers her a piece? How she 
values the gift: Your God, His Father's heart of 
love, longs to have you give Him everything. He 
knows that every gift you bring will bind you 
closer to Himself, every surrender will open your 
heart wider to get more of His spiritual gifts. 

When God's Word comes close to you and 
touches your heart, remember that it is Christ, out 
of whose mouth goes the two-edged sword. It is 
Christ in His love coming- to cut away the sin that 
He may fill your heart w T ith the blessing of God's 
love. 

5th. — Do not ask: "Can I be kept from sinning, 
if I keep close to Him?" but ask: "Can I be kept 
from sinning if He always keeps close to me?" and 
you see at once how safe it is to trust Him. 



100 AUGUST. 

I may point men to Jesus as earnestly as I will, 
but it will avail little unless I lead them to believe 
that they must have the Holy Spirit in them to re- 
veal Christ to them. 

6th. — As our whole life becomes filled with the 
humbling, solemn subduing presence of God, 
through the Holy Spirit, we shall walk about among 
people as men of God ; not as men who vaguely 
preach about the Book, and what is in the Book, 
but who preach what they are, and what they have 
seen of Jesus. 

EAGLE WINGS. 

7th. — When the Holy Spirit comes within us as 
the fire of God's love for souls there will come to us 
an intensity and desire too deep for words. Then 
is the time when the Holy Spirit prays in us with 
groanings which cannot be uttered. 

Love in the Spirit to each other and to all saints 
prayer in the name of Jesus ; God to be waited on 
and trusted — this is a threefold cord which cannot 
be broken. 

It is not always more w r ork that is needed ; some 
might with advantage work less ; the main thing is 
the quality of work that is done. 

8th. — What was to bring conviction that Jesus 
was the Christ? Love. That is what Christ said. 



AUGUST. IOI 

"I pray that they may be one that the world may 
know that Thou hast sent Me." Not preaching, but 
love. Preaching is needed, — praise God for what 
it does! — but love will do more. 

9th. — The Son of God came to earth to prove 
that the love of God in heaven could stand the trial 
of life — every enmity, every shame, every suffering, 
and live through it all. It is your high privilege to 
have your heart rilled with the heavenly love of 
Christ Jesus and to carry it to this life. 

10th. — I feel more and more deeply that you may 
have an earnest Christian, and yet his or her life be 
far below what God could make it, if he or she 
would wait for the Holy Spirit to get possession. 

In our prayers continually, and in our life, let 
this thought be our joy and our strength: How- 
ever ignorant I feel, and however feeble my words 
have been, the Spirit prays in me, and God who 
searches the hearts knows the mind of the Spirit. 

nth. — How does God teach His eaglet children 
to use their wings? He comes and stirs up their 
nest, with some tribulation or temptation. Why? 
Just as the eaglets ready to sink, find the mother 
coming under them and carrying them, so the ever- 
lasting arms are stretched out underneath the soul 
that feels itself ready to perish. As the eaglet 



102 AUGUST. 

trusts the mother to carry it, so my God asks me to 
trust Him that He will bear me. 

1 2th. — The everlasting God fainteth not, neither 
is weary. He giveth power to the faint and to them 
that have no might. He increaseth strength. If 
the everlasting God is never weary, you need never 
be weary, because your God is your strength. You 
have no strength but what God gives, and you can 
have all the strength that God can give. 

Study and love your Bible, but remember it is 
God who must give the orders, and you will fail if 
you take them from a book. Love your Bible and 
fill your heart with it, but let God apply it in your 
daily life. 

13th. — The great secret of a right waiting upon 
God is to be brought down to utter impotence. "I 
can do nothing of myself/' Jesus said that, and He 
just waited upon God. Would not you like to oc- 
cupy the very place that Jesus did before the Father 
and in the Father's heart? Would not you be willing 
to take that place, and to love every day as a man 
that has no might but is utterly helpless, and just to 
wait upon God? 

WAITING ON GOD. 

14th. — We must not only think of our waiting 
upon God, but also of what is more wonderful still, 



AUGUST. IO3 

of God's waiting upon us. If He waits for us then 
we are more than welcome. 

Who can measure the difference between the 
great sun and that little blade of grass? Yet the 
grass has all of the sun it can need or hold. In wait- 
ing on God His greatness and your littleness suit 
and meet each other most wonderfully. 

15th. — Christ not only said "Abide in Me," but 
also "I in you." The Epistles not only speak of us 
in Christ, but of Christ in us, the highest mystery 
of redeeming love. As we maintain our place in 
Christ day by day, God waits to reveal Christ in us. 

16th. — There is such a danger of our being so 
occupied with the things that are coming more than 
with Him who is to come. Nothing but humble 
waiting on God can save us from mistaking intellect- 
ual study for the true love of Him and His appear- 
ing. Not when we are most occupied with pro- 
phetic subjects, but when in humility and love we 
are clinging close to our Lord and His brethren, are 
we in the Lord's place. 

17th. — Instead of the tone of condemnation or of 
despair, wait upon God in behalf of His erring chil- 
dren. If these fail in doing it, give yourself doubly 
to it. 



104 AUGUST. 

At times, we are impatient with men and circum- 
stances that hinder us, or with ourselves and our 
slow progress in the Christian life. If we truly wait 
upon God, we shall find that it is with Him we are 
impatient, because He does not, as soon as we 
could wish, do our bidding. 

1 8th. — The activity of the mind in studying the 
Word or giving expression to its thoughts in prayer 
may so engage us that we do not come to the still 
waiting on the All Glorious One. 

MISCELLANEOUS EXTRACTS. 

19th. — If we seek above everything to be freed 
from our sin and to have the baptism of the Spirit, 
that Christ and His will may have the complete 
mastery in us, if we seek it for the sake of God's 
holiness that He may be glorified, and Christ be all, 
our happiness and our usefulness will come of them- 
selves. 

20th. — In Scripture we have the words of daily 
life, in themselves without life or power. The mind 
can study and utter them, but they bring neither 
help nor blessing. "The letter killeth; the Spirit 
quickeneth. ,, The fire of the Holy Spirit takes 
them as its fuel, and makes them the power by 
which the fire on the altars of our hearts is kept 
ever burning. 



AUGUST. 105 

2 1 st. — It is a terrible mistake to think that when 
once a man is rilled with the Spirit, persistent study 
of God's Word and reverent whole-hearted sub- 
mission to it, is not as much needed as before. 
"The priest shall burn wood on the altar every 
morning. ,, 

22nd. — Often Christian liberty is spoken of as 
freedom from restraint in sacrificing our will, or the 
enjoyment of the world Its real meaning is the 
very opposite. True love asks to be free from self 
and the world to bring its all to God. The truly 
free spirit asks: "How far am I free to follow 
Christ to the uttermost?" 

23rd. — Give up yourself to God's perfect love to 
work out His perfect will. For all He means you 
to do, He will surely give light and strength. The 
Throne of the Lamb is surely proof that there is no 
sure way for us to riches and honor than through 
His poverty. 

24th. — The soul that in simplicity yields to the 
leading of her Lord will find that the fellowship of 
His suffering brings even here the fellowship of 
His glory. "Though He was rich, yet for your 
sakes He became poor, that ye through His poverty 
might be rich." 

WITHIN. 

25th. — This is the chief mark and glory of the Son 



I06 AUGUST. 

of God: that He lived and died, not for Himself, 
but for others. It was to do God's will that Christ 
came from heaven. It is to do God's will in you, 
that He has entered your heart. Jesus won back 
for us the life man had been created for, with God 
dwelling in him, by giving to us His life, the very 
life He had lived. 

26th. — All the sin of heathendom, all the sin of 
Christendom is but the outgrowth of the one root — 
God dethroned, self enthroned, in the heart of man. 

The mark of a Kingdom is the presence of the 
King. With the Holy Spirit, Chist came down to 
be with His disciples as really and more nearly, 
than when in the flesh. The disciples had their 
Lord with them as consciously as the angels in 
heaven. His presence made heaven all around and 
in them. 

27th. — Think of the work Christ's disciples, sim- 
ple fishermen, dared to undertake and were able 
to accomplish, — their weapon the despised gospel 
of the crucified Nazarene. See how the coming of 
the Kingdom brought a new power from heaven 
by which feeble men were made mighty through 
God, and the slaves of Satan were made God's holy 
children. 

28th. — In the feebleness of the grave Jesus gained 



AUGUST. 107 

His throne. We need to die with Him, that is the 
way to get delivered from Self, the way to receive 
the heavenly life as a little child and so to enter the 
Kingdom. The feebleness of Bethlehem and the 
manger, of Calvary and the grave, were Christ's 
way into the Kingdom — for us there is no other 
way. 

29th. — As we seek to humble ourselves and to 
renounce all wish and all hope of being or doing 
good of ourselves, as we yield all our human ability 
and energy to the death in the confession that it is 
nothing but sinful and worthy of death, God's 
Spirit will make the power of Christ's death to sin 
work in us. we shall die with Him, and with Him be 
raised in newness of life. The new life will be the 
little child that receives the Kingdom. 

30th. — How little we think that our heart was 
actually created that God might live there, that He 
might show forth His life and love there, and that 
our love and joy might be in Him alone. How little 
we know that just as naturally as we have the love 
of parents or of children filling our hearts and 
making us happy, we can have the living God, for 
whom the heart was made, dwelling there and fill- 
ing it with His own blessedness and goodness. 

31st. — "Father, here am I for Thee to give as much 
in me of Christ's likeness as I can receive." Wait 



108 AUGUST. 

to hear Him say, "My child, I give thee as much of 
Christ as thy heart is open to receive." 

The manna of one day was corrupt when the next 
day came. I must have every day fresh grace from 
heaven ; and I obtain it only in direct waiting upon 
God Himself. 



SEPTEMBER. 

JESUS HIMSELF. 

ist. — What is the difference between a dead 
Christ whom the women went to anoint and a 
living Christ? A dead Christ I must do everything 
for, a living Christ does everything for me. 

In proportion as a man has not as a senti- 
ment or an aspiration, but in reality, the very spirit 
and presence of Jesus upon him, there comes out 
from him an unseen, silent influence. That secret 
influence is the holy presence of Jesus. 

2nd. — It is not your faith that will keep you 
standing, but it is a living Jesus, met every day in 
fellowship and worship and love. "J esus > Thou hast 
told me to believe, to obey, to abide near Thee; is 
there anything more I need to secure the enjoy- 
ment of Thine abiding presence ?" "I have re- 
deemed thee a witness to go out into the world con- 
fessing Me before men." Work for Him who is 
worthy ; His blessing and His presence will be found 
in the work. 

3rd. — You often try hard to trust God and you 



IIO SEPTEMBER. 

fail. Why? Because you have not taken time first 
to see God. How can you trust God fully until you 
have met Him and known Him? 

When God wanted to send any man upon His 
service, He first met him and talked with him and 
cheered him time after time. God appeared to 
Abraham seven or eight times and gave to him one 
command after another, and so Abraham learned to 
obey Him perfectly. God appeared to Joshua and 
to Gideon and they obeyed. Why are we not ob- 
edient? Because we have so little of this near inter- 
course with Jesus. 

4th. — We read, 'The Spirit of the Lord clothed 
Gideon. " There is in the New Testament an equally 
wonderful text: 'Tut on the Lord Jesus Christ," 
that is, clothe yourself with Christ Jesus. That does 
not only mean by inspiration of righteousness out- 
side of me, but to clothe myself with the living love 
of the living Christ. He whom I have to put on is 
as a garment covering my whole being. 

5th. — There are many Christians who know that 
they must not only believe in a crucified Christ, but 
in a living Christ, and they try to grasp it, but it 
does not bring them a blessing. Why? Because 
they want to feel it and not to believe it. They want 
to work for it and with efforts get hold of it, instead 
of just quietly sinking down and believing: "Christ, 



SEPTEMBER. Ill 

the living Jesus, He will do everything for us." 

Just as a living child lives day by day in the arms 
of its mother, and grows up year by year, under a 
mother's eye, it is a possibility that you can live 
every day and hour of your life in fellowship with 
the Holy Jesus. 

6th. — The great thing in prayer is to feel, that we 
are putting our supplications into the bosom of 
omnipotent Love. Before and above everything, 
let us take time ere we pray, to realize the glory and 
presence of God. (Miscellaneous). 

"God first" is a motto often misunderstood. God 
God first may mean "I" second. God is thus first 
in order, but one of a series of powers. The mean- 
ing of the words is really God all, everything. 

Christ cannot help coming in where there is a 
living faith, a full faith. Do let us believe, because 
"all things are possible to him that believeth." 
That is God's word. 

7th. — What is to make a difference between 
Christ's disciples and other people? It is this, to be 
in fellowship with Jesus, every hour of the day. 
Christ is able in heaven now to do what He could 
not do when He was on earth — to keep in the closest 
fellowship with every believer throughout the whole 
world. Why was my Lord Jesus taken up to 



112 SEPTEMBER. 

heaven away from the life of earth? Because the 
life of earth is confined to localities, but the life in 
heaven is a life in which there is no limit, no bound, 
no locality. Christ was taken up to heaven that in 
the power of the omnipresent God, He might be 
able to fill every individual here and be with every 
individual believer. 

8th. — When we have Jesus with us, and when we 
go every footstep with the thought that it is Jesus 
sends us, and is helping us, then there will be 
brightness in our testimony and it will help other 
believers to understand, "I see why I have failed. I 
took the word, the blessing, as I thought the life, 
but I was without the living Jesus." 

Just as really as Christ was with Peter in the boat, 
just as Christ sat with John at the table, as really 
can I have Christ with me — more really, for they 
had their Christ in the body, He was a man, an in- 
dividual separate from them, but I may have the 
glorified Christ in the power of the throne of God, 
the omnipotent, omnipresent Christ. 

THE MASTER'S INDWELLING. 

9th. — Why did God give the angels or man a self? 
God gave me the power of self-determination, that 
I might bring this self every day, and say : "Oh, 
God, work in it ; I offer it to thee." 



SEPTEMBER. II3 

God's Word teaches us that God does not expect 
a man to live as he ought for one minute, unless the 
Holy Spirit is in him to enable him to do it. 

Did ever a father or mother think, "For to-day I 
want my child to love me?" No, they expect the 
love every day. So God wants His child every 
moment to have a heart filled with love of the Spirit. 

10th. — Suppose a painter had a piece of canvas 
on which he desired to work out some beautiful de- 
sign, it does not belong to him, and any one has a 
right to take it and to use it for any other purpose ; 
do you think the painter would bestow much work 
on that? No. Yet people want Jesus Christ to 
bestow His trouble upon them in taking away this 
temper, or that other sin, though in their hearts they 
have not yielded themselves utterly to His command 
and His keeping. If you will come and give your 
whole life into His charge, Christ Jesus is mighty 
to save ; waits to fill you with His Spirit. 

nth. — Fellowship with the cross of Christ will be 
an unceasing denial of self, every hour and every 
moment by the grace of God. 

If I know that God is my God, not through 
man's teaching, not with my mind or my imagina- 
tion, but in the living evidence which God gives in 
my heart, then I know that the divine presence of 



114 • SEPTEMBER. 

my God will be so wonderful, and my God Himself 
so beautiful, so near, that I can live all my days and 
years a conqueror through Him that loved me. 

12th. — The pointer helps to show the place on 
the map, it might be of fine gold, but we want to see 
what the pointer points at. This Bible is nothing 
but a pointer, pointing to God; and, — may I say it 
with reverence, — Jesus Christ came to point us, to 
show us the way. He died, that He might bring 
us unto God. 

The tree of one hundred years old — when 
it was planted God did not give it a stock of life by 
which to carry on its existence. Every year God 
clothes the tree with its foliage and its fruit, and 
that is what God is for, to work in us by His mighty 
operation, without one moment's ceasing. 

13th. — Has God arranged that the light of that 
sun that will one day be burned up, can come to you 
unconsciously and shine in you blessedly and 
mightily ; and is God not willing, or not able, to let 
His light and His presence so shine through you, 
that you can walk all the day, with God nearer to 
you than anything in nature? 

What is religion? Just as much as you have of 
God working in you. If you want more religion, 
more strength, more fruitfulness, you must have 
more of God. 



SEPTEMBER. 115 

14th. — Israel passed through two stages: — 
brought out from Egypt into Canaan. If you would 
know the difference between the life you have been 
leading, and the life you now want to lead, look at 
the wilderness and Canaan. In the wilderness, 
wandering; in Canaan, perfect rest; in the wilder- 
ness, want; in Canaan, plenty. In the wilderness, 
no victory; in Canaan, they went from victory to 
victory. 

15th. — The Holy Spirit is much spoken of in con- 
nection with power ; not so much spoken of in con- 
nection with the graces ; yet these are always more 
important than the gifts of power — the holiness, the 
meekness, and the lovingness ; these are the true 
marks of the Kingdom. 

The word "Lamb" must mean to us not only a 
sacrifice, the shedding of blood, but the meekness 
of God, incarnate upon earth, represented in the 
meekness and gentleness of a little Lamb. 

16th. — It is good to be saved from the sins of 
stealing, murdering and every other evil ; but a man 
needs above all to be saved from what is the root of 
all sin, his self-will and his pride. 

If the windows of your room were closed the sun 
would be on the outside of the building, streaming 
against the shutters, but it could not enter. Leave 



Il6 SEPTEMBER. 

the windows without shutters, and the light can 
come in and fill the room. Even so, Jesus and His 
Light, Jesus and His humility, are around you on 
every side, longing to enter into your heart. 

17th. — Christians do not know how much they 
rob Christ of, in reading so much of the literature of 
the world. They are often so occupied with their 
newspapers, that the Bible gets a very small place. 
Bring this noble power of a mind that can think 
heavenly, eternal, and infinite things and lay it at 
the feet of Jesus. 

The Church of Christ suffers more to-day, 
from trusting in intellect, in sagacity, in culture, and 
in mental refinement, than from almost anything 
else. The Spirit of the world comes in, and men 
seek by their wisdom, and by their knowledge, to 
help the Gospel, and they rob it of its crucifixion 
mark. 

18th. — I see divine things but cannot reach them ; 
the self-life is like an invisible plate glass. We are 
willing, we are striving, and yet we are holding 
back something; w r e are afraid to give up every- 
thing to God. 

Your heart is too holy to have it filled with busi- 
ness ; let the business be in the head and under the 
feet, but let Christ have the whole heart, and He 
will keep the whole life. 



SEPTEMBER. 117 

The Holy Spirit could pray a hundred fold more 
in us if we were only conscious of our ignorance, 
because we would then feel our dependence upon 
Him. 

19th. — The smith puts his rod of iron into the 
fire. If he leaves it there but a short time it does 
not become red hot. If he takes time and leaves the 
rod in the fire, the whole iron will become red hot 
with the heat that is in the fire. So if we are to get 
the fire of God's holiness and love and power we 
must take more time with God in fellowship. 

Ah, the blessedness of saying, "God and 
I!" But I find in the Bible a more precious word 
still, it is, "God and not I," not God first, and I sec- 
ond ; God is all, and I am nothing. 

SPIRITUAL LIFE. 

20th. — We often speak of the wonderful revela- 
tion of the Father's heart in His welcome to the 
prodigal son, but we have a revelation of the 
Father's love far more wonderful in what He says 
to the elder son, "Son, thou art ever with me and all 
that I have is thine." What was the cause of the 
terrible difference between the heart of the father 
and the experince of the son? Unbelief. 

If we are to experience a deepening of spiritual 
life, we want to discover clearly what is the spiritual 



Il8 SEPTEMBER. 

life that God would have us live, and to ask 
whether we are living that life, or if not, what 
hinders our living it fully. 

2 1 st. — The majority of Christians seem to regard 
the whole of the Spirit's work as confined to con- 
viction and conversion; they hardly know that He 
came to dwell in our hearts, and there reveal God 
in us. 

Unbelief is the mother of disobedience, and all 
other sins and shortcomings — my temper, my 
pride, my unlovingness, my worldliness. Though 
these differ in nature and form yet they all come 
from the one root, namely, that we do not believe 
in the freedom and fulness of the divine gift of the 
Holy Spirit, to dwell in us and strengthen us, and fill 
us with the life and grace of God all the day long. 

22nd. — Walk like Christ, and you shall always 
abide near Christ. The presence of Christ invites 
you to come and have unbroken fellowship with 
Him. 

To walk through all the circumstances and temp- 
tations of life is exactly like [Peter's] walking on 
the water — you have no solid ground under your 
feet, but you have the Word of God to rest on. 

I remember the time in my spiritual life, that 
when I failed my only thought was to reproach 



SEPTEMBER. TI9 

and condemn myself. I found it did not do me 
good; I learn from Peter [walking on the water] 
that my work is, the very moment I fail, to say 
"Jesus, Master, help me," and the very moment I 
say that, Jesus does help me. 

23rd. — A father never sends his child away with 
the thought that he does not care about his child 
knowing that he loves him. He longs to have his 
child believe that he has the light of his father's 
countenance upon him all the day. If it be so with 
an earthly father, what think you of God? Does He 
not want every child of His to know that he is con- 
stantly living in the light of His countenance? 

Who knows but what, just as Jesus said to the 
woman of Samaria, Give Me, because He wanted 
to say, / will give thee, He is asking you this gift to- 
day to lead you to see what is lacking in your spiri- 
tual life. — The Cross of Christ. 

24th. — The terrible history of mankind can never 
be rightly understood till we allow Scripture to 
teach us that, even as there is a purpose in God 
which overrules all, so there is, on the other hand, 
amid what appears nothing but a natural growth 
and development, an organized system and king- 
dom that holds rule over men, that keeps them in 
darkness, and uses them in its war against the king- 
dom of God's Son. — The Cross of Christ. 



120 SEPTEMBER. 

25th. — When Christ came to save men, ere He 
entered His public ministry, He had first to meet 
God, and deal with Him. In His baptism He en- 
tered into fellowship with sinners, and gave Himself 
to fulfill all righteousness; in the vision of the 
opened heaven and the descending dove, as in the 
voice of the Father, He received the seal of the 
Divine approval. He then had to meet the Temp- 
ter, through whom Adam had fallen ; only then 
could He begin His ministry among men. As defi- 
nitely as Christ in the work of salvation had to deal 
with God and with man, had He to deal with Satan 
too. There was no salvation possible, but as Satan's 
power was acknowledged, and met, and overthrown. 
— The Cross of Christ. 

26th. — Is it possible that the lack of Christ's pov- 
erty is the cause of our lack of His riches? Is there 
not a needs-be that we not only think of the one 
side, "For your sakes He became poor;" but as 
much of the other, "For His sake I suffer the loss of 
all things." — The Poverty of Christ. 

27th. — The poverty of Christ has been to tens of 
thousands the assurance that He could feel for 
them ; that even as with Him, earthly need was to be 
the occasion of heavenly help ; the school for a life 
of faith; and the experience of God's faithfulness, 
the path to heavenly riches.— The Poverty of Christ. 



SEPTEMBER. 121 

28th. — As it was with the fruit good for food and 
pleasant to the eye, sin entered the world, so the 
great power of the world over men is in the cares, 
and possessions, and enjoyments of this life. Christ 
came to win the world back to God. He did so, by 
refusing every temptation to accept its gifts or seek 
its aid. Of this protest against the worldly spirit, 
its self-pleasing and its trust in the visible, the pov- 
erty of Christ was one of the chief elements. — The 
Poverty of Christ. 

29th. — Christ overcame the world, first, in the 
temptations by which its prince sought to ensnare 
Himself, then and through that in its power over 
us. — The Poverty of Christ. 

In Paul's wonderful life, as in His writings, he 
proves what weight it gives to the testimony con- 
cerning eternal things, when the witness can appeal 
to his own experience of the infinite satisfaction 
which the unseen riches can give. — The Poverty of 
Christ. 

30th. — In monastic days, men expected from 
poverty what only the Spirit of Christ, revealing 
itself in poverty, could accomplish. Here was the 
failure. — The Poverty of Christ. 

Christ separated for Himself a band of men, who 
were to live with Him in closest fellowship, in entire 



122 SEPTEMBER. 

conformity to His life, under His immediate train- 
ing. These three conditions were indispensable for 
their receiving the Holy Spirit, for being true wit- 
nesses to Him and the life which He had lived, and 
would impart to men.— The Poverty of Christ. 



OCTOBER. 

WHY DO YOU NOT BELIEVE? 

ist. — After a sermon or a conversation a soul had 
a little light but speedily again lost it. He did not 
still keep the promises anew before him, that unbelief 
might not again obtain the upper hand. 

The question must be continually repeated, "What 
does God require me to believe?" and in the face of 
whatever weakness, must the answer be at His feet : 
"Lord, I believe, I will believe." 

Martha did not yet believe everything, but what 
she believed that she spoke out before the Lord. 
She believed in Him as the Son of the Living God ; 
this was the principal thing and the source of greater 
faith. She was diligent in prayer, that her faith 
would be strengthened and become capable of re- 
ceiving yet more and more. 

2nd. — He, who knows that there is a Spirit to ac- 
tuate to faith, knows also that man may, with spirit 
and hope, strive to exercise faith. 

The more fully the soul believes, the more clear 
becomes the revelation of the Spirit ; the more fully 



124 OCTOBER. 

the Spirit works in it, the more does the soul grow 
in the life of faith and confidence. Thus we may 
have the Spirit of faith. 

No sooner is faith cultivated in a one-sided fash- 
ion, without a growing conscientiousness of the 
casting off of little sins, and the sanctification of the 
whole heart and walk, then it becomes a work 
merely of the understanding or the feeling. 

3rd. — We teach our children to utter words which 
they do not yet fully understand, in the confidence, 
that the thoughts and feelings expressed in them 
will be gradually imprinted on their hearts. Idle 
and sinful words are at the outset uttered care- 
lessly, become rooted in the heart and bear their 
own fruits. And what do we not observe in prayer? 
That the soul uttering "Thy will be done," although 
the heart does not as yet fully assent, shall at last by 
the very use of the expression, submit to the casting 
out of the unwilling disposition. 

4th. — Sincerity is that attitude of the soul, in 
virtue of which we present ourselves to the Lord 
just as we are, neither better nor worse. 

The Word has not yet defined how deeply one 
must feel sin before one may come to Jesus: it has 
fixed no measure. The first sense of need must 
bring us to Him. Remaining apart from Jesus is 
just the way to make the sense of sin less. 



OCTOBER. 125 

5th. — Always the closer to the light, the more 
visible the impurity; the nearer to the Holy One, 
the stronger the sense of unworthiness ; the more 
blessed with grace, the deeper the conviction of sin. 

You wound Him in the most tender point when 
you doubt if His grace is indeed for you, and so 
drag its greatness and trustworthiness into doubt. 

Just because you fear your own unfaithfulness, 
you must place your confidence on God's faithful- 
ness. 

6th — It is not my business to be anxious, and to 
say how God's Word can be fulfilled. The Lord 
will see to it. 

If the Lord has given no promises for you, then 
it cannot be your duty to believe. But, as surely as 
the Word says, "Believe," is there also a promise 
which you must believe. 

There is no lost one, so far lost, that Jesus cannot 
find him and cannot save him. 

7th. — Give yourself to the Lord Jesus just as you 
are. Not as an offering that is worthy of Him, not 
as one who is already His friend. No, surrender 
yourself to Him as one that is dead, whom He has 
to make alive, as an enemy whom He must forgive. 

With one, it is trial in the physical life ; with 
another, trial in the family; with another, vexation 



126 OCTOBER. 

of soul ; with still more, hidden conflict with sin. 
But trial there must be ; for so long as the flesh 
has everything agreeable, the soul will never wholly 
and with power cleave to the Lord. 

8th. — When the Lord is to lead a soul to great 
faith, He leaves its prayers unheard. So it was with 
the Canaanite woman. He answered her not one 
word, and when He did at length reply to her, the 
answer was still more unfavorable than His silence. 
This is always the way. If the answer came imme- 
diately His gifts would occupy its attention so 
much, that it would overlook the Lord Himself. It 
must first stand upon its Lord and what He has 
provided, without any answer ; He and His word are 
to suffice for it. 

9th. — The more you simply take the Word, read 
and read again the message of God, contemplate one 
after another, the promises with which God has 
made it sure that the Saviour is for every sinner, 
the sooner shall you feel constrained to say, "It is 
true ; God says it ; I must believe it." 

Just as water ever seeks and fills the lowest place, 
so the moment, God finds the creature abased and 
empty, His glory and power flow in to exalt and to 
bless. "He that humbleth himself" — that must be 
our one care — "shall be exalted," — that is God's 



OCTOBER. 127 

care; by His mighty power, and in His great love 
He will do it. 

10th. — Then believed they His words; they sang 
His praise: In believing, the soul wholly for- 
gets itself, and with undivided energy looks to 
God and hears Him ; in thanksgiving, the soul 
must be entirely occupied with the adoration 
of the Godhead, the contemplation of His good- 
ness, the consideration of His ways. Accord- 
ingly the more the mind is exercised in this 
work, and is taken up with the thought of all 
this, the more shall there be fixed and rooted in it 
the conviction that the Lord is truly a God on whom 
it is its duty to rely. If thanksgiving, the express 
mention of His omnipotence, His love, His faithful- 
ness, His perfection shall fill the soul, the result 
cannot but be that the soul shall suffer it to be con- 
centrated on God. He, that has but a single word 
of such a God to build upon, has enough. 

nth. — If you are still unconverted, thank Him 
that you are still not in hell. 

Praising and believing are one. 

There must be a continual repetition of the act of 
faith, cleaving fast to the word of God, until He 
bestows the blessing. 

You also shall be born again by the Living Word, 
and be cleansed from your sin. It does not lie in 



128 OCTOBER. 

you, nor even in the Word regarded in itself, but 
in the faithfulness of God, who has said: "He that 
believeth shall not be ashamed. " 

Paul always speaks of the works of the law ; 
James of the works of faith. The works of the law 
are done of the personal power of man, to fulfill the 
law of God in order to merit His favor. The works 
of faith are done for the confirmation and the per- 
fecting of faith, out of the power which God gives 
and not to merit anything. 

1 2th. — He who with faithful perseverance con- 
tinues day by day in the use of the Word, even when 
he does not at once observe blessing from it, shall 
experience increase of faith, although unobserved 
and slow, yet certain and sure. Many are often con- 
tent in the morning with the general reading of the 
Word in the household, apart from private medita- 
tion with prayer. The reading of a chapter once a 
day is, as a rule, not sufficient. No, let all that truly 
desire to increase in faith, see to it that they endeavor 
in the morning hour to gather for the day manna 
on which to ruminate. He, that goes out in the 
morning without nutriment, comes home weary in 
the evening, with but little desire to eat. He, who 
does not in the morning first lay up the Word in 
his heart is not to be surprised if the world assumes 
the first and the chief place in his heart, for he has 



OCTOBER. 129 

neglected the only means of being in advance of the 
world. 

13th. — Readiness and ability for any work is not 
given before the work, but only through the work, 
thus only after we begin to work. The child that 
learns to run, begins before he can readily do it, and 
learns in the effort. 

God gives commands for which we have previously 
no power, yet requires obedience with full right; 
because when we set ourselves towards obedience, 
strength will be given along with this incipient ac- 
tivity. 

14th. — Whenever the devil is bent on keeping 
back anyone from salvation, he has merely to keep 
him back also from faith. Lu. 8:12. 

The heart cannot at the same time move towards 
God and away from God, cannot equally desire the 
Word and sin. 

When one remembers how superficially the Word 
is read, what little pains is taken to understand the 
Word, to take into the heart and keep there every 
day that which should be fitted to strengthen faith, 
one feels how lightly and easily the Word is taken 
away ; it costs the devil little trouble. 

15th. — Even the devil knows this: where the 
Word dwells in the heart, there faith comes, 



130 OCTOBER. 

Before that Word, the evil one retreats, as before 
the "It is written" out of Jesus' mouth: with and by 
that Word, the Lord God and His Spirit come to 
the soul. 

The Lord who gives the Word will also give the 
faith to receive it; He who has given the promise 
will also bestow the fulfillment. Set yourself to 
believe, in the joyful confidence: it is given. 

Let every experience of failure, of unbelieving, 
of insensibility convince you, how unfortunate it 
would be if you had to believe of yourself, how 
blessed that vou mav look to God for it. 



HUMILITY. 

1 6th. — Humility is not something which we bring 
to God, or He bestows, it is simply the sense of 
entire nothingness, which comes when we see how 
truly God is all, and in which we make way for God 
to be all. 

"Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the 
Kingdom of heaven ; blessed are the meek, for they 
shall inherit the earth." The poor who have noth- 
ing in themselves, to them the Kingdom comes. 
The meek, who seek nothing in themselves, theirs 
the earth shall be. The blessings of heaven and 
earth are for the lowly. 



OCTOBER. I3I 

17th. — Xo outward instructions, not even of 
Christ Himself; no argument, however convincing; 
no sense of the beauty of humility, however deep, 
no personal resolve or effort, however sincere and 
earnest, can cast out the devil of pride Xothing 
can avail but this, that the new nature in its divine 
humility be revealed in power to take the place of 
the old, to become as truly our very nature as that 
ever was. 

1 8th. — The only humility that is really ours is not 
that which we try to show before God in prayer, 
but that which we carry with us, and carry out in 
our ordinary conduct. The insignificancies of daily 
life are the importances and the tests of eternity, 
because they prove what really is the Spirit that 
possesses us. It is in our most ungarded moments, 
that we really show and see what we are. To know 
the humble man, to know how he behaves, you must 
follow him in the common course of daily life. 

19th. — The believer is often in danger of aiming 
at, and rejoicing in the more manly virtues, — bold- 
ness, joy, contempt of the world, zeal, self-sacrifice 
— Even the old Stoics practised these, while the 
deeper, diviner graces, those which Jesus first taught 
upon earth because He brought them from heaven: 
those which are more distinctly connected with His 
cross and the death of self, — poverty of spirit, meek- 



132 OCTOBER. 

ness, humility, lowliness, — are scarcely thought of 
or valued. 

20th. — It is the soul in which God the Creator, as 
the All of the creature in its nothingness, — God the 
Redeemer in His grace, as the All of the sinner in 
his sinfulness, is waited for and trusted and wor- 
shipped, that will find itself so filled with His pres- 
ence, that there will be no place for self. "The 
haughtiness of man shall be brought low, and the 
Lord alone shall be exalted in that day." 

21st. — Pride makes faith impossible. "How can 
ye believe who receive glory from one another?" 
Faith and humility are at root one. We can never 
have more of true faith than we have of true 
humility. We may indeed have strong intellectual 
conviction of the truth but pride makes the living 
faith which has power with God, an impossibility. 

There are two cases in which Jesus spoke of a 
great faith. Had not the centurion, at whose faith 
He marvelled, saying, "I have not found so great 
faith, no, not in Israel" spoken, "I am not worthy 
that thou shouldst come under my roof?" Had not 
the mother to whom He spoke "Woman, great is 
thy faith" accepted the name of dog and said, "Yea, 
Lord, yet the dogs eat of the crumbs?" 

22nd. — All God's dealings with man are charac- 



OCTOBER. 133 

terized by two stages. Preparation: when command 
and promisetrainmenfor a higher stage; fulfillment: 
when faith inherits the promise, and enjoys what it 
had so often struggled for in vain. God who had 
been the Beginning, ere man rightly knew Him, 
or fully understood what His purpose was, is longed 
for and welcomed as the End, the All in All. 



23rd. — Humility becomes us as creatures, as sin- 
ners, as saints. The first we see in the heavenly 
hosts, unfallen man, Jesus as Son of Man. The 
second appeals to us in our fallen state, and points 
out the only way through which we can return to 
our right place as creatures. In the third we have 
the mystery of grace, which teaches us that as we 
lose ourselves in the overwhelming greatness of re- 
deeming love, humility becomes to us the consum- 
mation of everlasting blessedness and adoration. 

24th. — What is Jesus' incarnation but His heav- 
enly humility, His emptying Himself and becoming 
man? What is His life on earth but humility, His 
taking the form of a servant? What is His atone- 
ment but humility: — He humbled Himself and 
became obedient unto death? What is His ascen- 
sion but humility exalted to the throne and crowned 
with glory? "He humbled Himself, therefore God 
highly exalted Him." 



134 OCTOBER. 

Only humility leads to perfect death ; only death 
perfects humility. Humility and death are in their 
very nature one ; humility is the end ; in death the 
fruit is ripened to perfection. 

The Christian's life ever bears the twofold mark ; 
its roots striking in true humility deep into the grave 
of Jesus, the death to sin and self: its head lifted up 
in resurrected power to the heaven where Jesus is. 

25th. — We know the law of human nature: acts 
produce habits, habits produce dispositions, disposi- 
tions form the will; and, the rightly formed will is 
character. It is not otherwise in the w r ork of grace. 

It is only in the possession of God that I lose 
myself. As it is in the height and breadth and glory 
of the sunshine that the littleness of the mote playing 
in its beams is seen, even so humility is the taking 
our place in God's presence to be nothing but a 
mote dwelling in the sunshine of His love. 

26th. — Let us ask whether we regard a reproof, 
just or unjust; a reproach from friend or enemy; 
an injury, or trouble, or difficulty into which others 
bring us as above all an opportunity of proving how 
Jesus is all to us, how our own pleasure or honor are 
nothing. It is indeed blessed, the deep happiness of 
heaven to be so free from self that whatever is said 
of us, or done to us, is lost and swallowed up in the 
thought that Jesus is all. 



OCTOBER. I35 

27th. — With the abiding in Christ everything is 
yielded to the power of His life in us, that it may 
exercise its sanctifying influence even on ordinary 
wishes and desires. His Holy Spirit breathes 
through our whole being; and our desires, as the 
breathings of the Divine life, are in conformity with 
the Divine will, and are fulfilled. Abiding in Christ 
renews and sanctifies the will : We ask what we will 
and it is given us. — Abide in Christ. 

28th. — The peace of Christ is* not something that 
He puts into your heart and that you must keep 
that it may keep you. If the peace of God is to rule 
in my heart it is because the God of peace Himself 
is there. Can you separate the light of the sun from 
the sun? You cannot have the peace of Christ apart 
from Christ. — Northfield Echoes. 

29th. — In Revelations we read of only two 
churches in which there was nothing to blame. In 
each of the others you find the word "repent." 
There could be no overcoming, and receiving a 
blessing unless they repented. Let us repent on 
behalf of the Church of Christ, and God will make 
us feel how much our own sins are part of the trou- 
ble. Then God will give His Holy Spirit and will 
encourage us to feel that He will revive His work. 
— Northfield Echoes. 

30th. — Every man acts always according to the 



I36 OCTOBER. 

idea he has of his state. A king acts like a king if 
he is conscious of his kingship. So I cannot live the 
life of a true believer unless I am conscious every 
day that I am dead in Christ. He died unto sin, I 
am united with Him, and I am dead to sin. — North- 
field Echoes. 

31st. — Joseph was sold by his brethren, but he 
saw God in it and was content. Christ was betrayed 
by Judas, condemned by Caiaphas and given over 
to execution by Pilate, but in it all Christ saw God 
and was content. All that Potiphar had he left in 
Joseph's hands. He could now do the king's busi- 
ness with two hands and an undivided heart. Will 
you leave all in Jesus' hands and so be free to attend 
to the King's business? Every temptation will 
bring you a blessing if Jesus has charge of every- 
thing. — Northfield Echoes. 



NOVEMBER. 



THE CROSS OF CHRIST. 



ist. — As each seed bears fruit after its kind and 
of its very own nature, and the fruit in its turn again 
becomes a seed, so the Spirit of Christ was the hid- 
den seed-life of which the cross was the fruit. And 
the cross again became the seed of which the Spirit 
is the fruit. And, once again, the Spirit in the be- 
liever, and the Church as a whole, is the seed, of 
which the conformity to the cross and the death of 
Christ is the fruit. It is the great work of the Spirit 
to fill the world with this blessed seed, everywhere 
to reproduce the image and the likeness of the cruci- 
fied Lord, The highest work of the Spirit is to re- 
veal the cross — the wisdom and the power of God. 

2nd. — It is as the Church proves itself the very 
body of the Lord Jesus, by showing forth the very 
same life there was in Him, that His power as Head 
can freely flow through her. It is as her determina- 
tion' not to know anything but Jesus Christ and 
Him crucified is seen in her being crucified with 
Christ, being crucified to the world, that His resur- 
rection, joy and power can be manifested in her. 



13$ NOVEMBER. 

In the church the world must hear and see Jesus 
Christ and Him crucified. 

Such intense devotion to the cross and the cruci- 
fied Lord, as works inward and outward conformity 
to Him, is the first requisite of the Gospel minister, 
if Paul is at all to be counted a model for imitation. 
It was the one secret of his ministry and his power. 

3rd. — The confidence with which the preacher 
speaks rests not on a message or a book alone — 
that never alone can enable him to speak as one who 
knows and witnesses. His commission is a living 
one — in such measure as the Holy Spirit has re- 
vealed the cross to him and in him, can he testify 
in power of what it is and does. The mysteTy of God 
is, Christ in us, the hope of glory — not a thought, 
but a life with its knowledge, not that of the mind, 
but of the renewed spirit. The preacher can speak 
the mystery with authority, when he knows that the 
office of God the Holy Spirit is to give the mystery 
entrance into the heart, however dark. The word of 
Divine authority and power brings men into God's 
presence, wakens a sense of want and desire, and 
inspires faith in an unseen but present deliverance. 

4th. — The cross is the greatest of all mysteries — 
their sum and centre. In it we see the mystery of 
God — the Father ordaining, the Son bearing, the 
Spirit revealing and honoring it. The mystery of 



NOVEMBER. I39 

man — his sin, rejecting Christ; his curse, Christ for- 
saken of God; his worth, God's Son dying for him. 
The mystery of love — God offering Himself to bear 
the sin and the suffering of man, and making man 
one with Himself. The mystery of death and of life 
— death reigning, death conquered and made the 
gateway of life-eternal. The mystery of redemption 
— the cross with its sin and shame made the power 
that conquers the sinner, and, while it humbles and 
slays, that wakens his hope and highest enthusiasm. 
The mystery of God's wisdom casting down reason 
and filling the heart with the light of God and eter- 
nity. 

5th. — Just as I cannot by any possibility know 
the taste or nourishing power of a food, except by 
partaking of it so there is no way of knowing Christ 
Jesus and Him crucified, but by receiving Him into 
my life, and being made partaker of the disposition 
that animated His life and His cross. Jesus Christ 
is the revelation of the life of God, as it appears and 
acts in human nature. In the Holy Spirit, Jesus 
Christ is come from heaven to live and act in His 
disciples. We only know Jesus Christ as far as we 
partake of His nature and life and Spirit. 

Is it any wonder that the preaching of the Gospel 
is not more effectual when men forget that they are 
preaching a Divine mystery to those whom the god 
of this world hath blinded? The darkness of heart 



140 NOVEMBER. 

is a supernatural one — the power that can enlighten 
is not the force of reason or argument, not the per- 
suasion of culture or appeal, but the supernatural 
enlightening and quickening of the Holy Spirit. "It 
is God who hath shined in our hearts, to give the 
knowledge of the glory of God, in the face of Jesus 
Christ." The light of God shining in the heart, 
alone can witness to the mystery of His love in the 
cross. The great hindrance to the preaching of the 
cross is a worldly spirit. The worldly spirit proves 
itself in nothing so much as in that, which is its 
chief boast — its wisdom. 

6th. — Have we not often sought by earnest 
thought to enter more deeply into the significance 
of the cross? Have we not, as we got a glimpse of 
some aspect of its glory, gone from book to book 
to find out what it really means? Have not some 
given up hope that words like "I am crucified with 
Christ," "the world is crucified to me," "baptized into 
His death," "dead unto sin and alive unto God in 
Christ," should ever become truly intelligible and 
helpful? Is not the reason of all this that we want 
to grasp the hidden wisdom of God with our little 
mind, and forget that the Holy Spirit wants to give 
it into the heart, and into the inner life, in a way and 
in a power that passeth knowledge? 

The cross brings to each one who believes in it, 



NOVEMBER. I4I 

the death that is "the gate of life." There is given 
through it the fulness and the power of the Spirit. 

7th. — Remember that His Holy Spirit, His cruci- 
fixion Spirit, is in you, not first of all to give you 
clear or beautiful thoughts, which might delude 
you, but to communicate the very temper and dis- 
position out of which the cross grew. 

When the Church has to complain of the with- 
holding of the saving power, the reason must be 
that the crucifixion spirit in which the saving 
power finds its life, is wanting. It must be because 
the Church is not saying as Paul said, "I came not 
with excellency of speech, or of wisdom, proclaim- 
ing the wisdom of God, for I determined not to 
know anything save Christ and Him crucified. " 

In that life of our Lord the most remarkable 
thing, its great feature, its Divine mystery and 
glory, was His being crucified on the cross. He 
proved how life has no object but as it can be made 
to serve God's w T ill ; how suffering and sacrificing 
all is the highest and most well-pleasing religion and 
obedience ; how there is no way out of the life into 
which He has brought us into the Glory of God, 
but through dying to it. 

The cross means the sacrifice of all. To know 
the Crucified in the conformity of His death, we 
need to count all things loss. The cross demands 



142 NOVEMBER. 

the life. It is a ministry that comes not in ex- 
cellency of speech, or wisdom, but boasts in the 
"weakness" and the "foolishness" of the cross that 
will convict the world of its sin and its earthliness, 
and will lift men up to a supernatural life. 

8th. — We must ever return to our Lord, and men 
like His servant Paul, and see what the elements 
are that go to make up the crucifixion spirit. A 
deep sense of the sinfulness of sin, and of the right- 
eousness of God's judgment on it; an entire separa- 
tion from the world, and a clear protest against its 
apostasy from God, under the power of the god of 
this world ; a life-long surrender of our own will 
and pleasure as a sacrifice to God to work out His 
will in us ; a parting with all excellency of speech 
and wisdom as making the cross of none effect; a 
passion of love for the souls of men, giving its life 
as completely up for them as Christ did ; the ac- 
ceptance of death to all that is of human nature as 
sinful and under the curse that the life and power 
of heaven may work all in us: this was the spirit 
that animated Paul as it animated Jesus Christ. 

9th. — Accept your sense of ignorance heartily: 
depend entirely upon the Spirit to reveal the hidden 
mystery in "the hidden part ;" count confidently on 
the work He is doing in you. Keep your heart set 
on your Crucified Lord in meditation and worship, 



NOVEMBER. I43 

with an increasing sense of how little you know or 
understand, and the Blessed Spirit will do His 
hidden work where you cannot see it. Trust Him 
fully: He will do it. 

The cross is the wisdom of God in a mystery: 
the Spirit of God alone can reveal it. How this 
would teach us how to preach the cross aright. A 
mystery must be accepted on authority. The Apostle 
or preacher holds a Divine commission to tell men 
in the name of God what they do not know, what 
they cannot understand, until they first bow before 
God to accept it. 

10th. — The spirit of the world, apparently honor- 
ing and proclaiming the cross, is the great cause 
why the Church's preaching is so little in demon- 
stration and in power. It robs the cross of what is 
its chief glory, that it is the wisdom of God in a 
mystery, with the Holy Spirit from heaven as its 
only interpreter. 

The sense of mystery is of the very essence of 
true worship. Though at first it burdens and bows 
down, it soon becomes as the high mountain air, in 
which faith breathes free and strong. The sense of 
mystery brings the soul under the power of the In- 
visible and Eternal, the Holy and Divine. 

The cross the wisdom of God in a mystery: let 
us bow and worship and wait in deep hnmility. 



144 NOVEMBER. 

What God devised God will reveal. We are come 
to Mount Zion: the Lamb is the light thereof. As 
we adore what we cannot, would not understand, 
the Spirit will impart what God hath bestowed. 
And we shall learn to walk as men who know that 
what ear hath not heard, and what heart cannot 
conceive, God is working out in them that love 
Him. 

nth. — Let anyone who desires to be brought into 
fellowship with his crucified Lord, hold fast the 
words "The wisdom of God in a mystery: God hath 
revealed it to us by His Spirit." As you gaze upon 
the cross, and long for conformity to Him, be not 
weary or fearful because you cannot express in 
words what you seek. Ask Him to plant the cross 
in your heart. Believe in Him, the crucified and now 
Living One, to dwell within you, and breathe His 
own mind there. It is not alone the work of Christ 
but the living Christ Himself, as the crucified One 
that the Gospel reveals. A sinner often wearies 
himself in vain, in trying to take hold of the work 
of Christ and its blessings. When he sees that it 
is Jesus Christ Himself, and Him crucified, he has 
to trust, he finds one who takes charge and works 
all in him. 

LET US DRAW NIGH. 

1 2th. — How much your life depends on your re- 
lation to the promises. Connect the promises with 



NOVEMBER. I45 

the Promiser, the Promiser with His unchanging 
faithfulness as God, and your hope will become a 
glorying in God through Jesus Christ our Lord. 

Confession strengthens hope; what we utter be- 
comes more real to us. It glorifies God. It helps 
and encourages those around us. Fulness of faith 
and fulness of hope make the true heart. Because 
we have nothing in ourselves, and God is to be all, 
and to do all, our whole attitude is to be to look up 
to Him, expecting and receiving what He is to do. 
The entrance into the Holiest is given us as priests, 
there to be filled with the Spirit, and the love of 
Christ, and to go out and bring Christ's blood to 
others. 

No effort of thy will can bring forth love. It 
must be given thee from above. 

13th. — The knowledge of what Christ has won for 
me, the entrance into the Heavenlies; of the work 
He did to win it, the shedding of His blood, all this 
is very precious. But there is something better 
still: The living, loving Son of God is there person- 
ally to make me partaker of all the blessedness that 
God has for me. 

In the Court there were the Brazen Altar and the 
Laver. At the one, the priest sprinkled the blood, 
at the other he washed ere he entered the Holy 
Place. At the installation of the Passover, they 



I46 NOVEMBER. 

were first washed and then sprinkled with blood. 
In the Great Day of Atonement, the high priest 
had to wash ere he entered the Holiest. The Word 
and water are joined together, — Eph. 5:26; Jno. 
13:10; 15:3 — because the Word is the external 
manifestation of what must rule our whole outer life. 
The liberty of access, the cleansing the Blood gives, 
can only be enjoyed in a life of which every action 
is cleansed by the Word. 

14th. — Nothing will help us to keep ourselves un- 
spotted in this w r orld, but the Spirit that was in 
Christ, that looked upon His body as prepared by 
God for His service. It is for every man as for the 
Master to put away sin by the sacrifice of self. Not 
burnt sacrifices but the sacrifice of our own will to 
do God's will, is what delights God. 

Our eating and drinking, our sleeping, our cloth- 
ing, our labor and relaxation, influence our spiritual 
life. They often interrupt the fellowship we seek 
to maintain. Through the body Satan conquered 
in Paradise ; in the body he tempted Christ. It was 
in sufferings of the body that Christ was perfected. 

15th. — Where God is, is heaven, the heaven of 
His presence includes this earth, too. Into the Holi- 
est into the light of God's holy presence and love, 
into full union with Him, the soul can enter by faith 



NOVEMBER. I47 

that makes us one with Christ, and abide continu- 
ally, because Jesus abideth continually. 

The boldness to enter into the Holiest is not a 
conscious feeling of confidence, it is the objective 
God-given right of entrance of which the Blood 
assured us. The measure of our boldness is the 
worth God attaches to the Blood of Jesus. 

Which is now greater in your sight: Your sin, or 
the Blood of Jesus? There can be but one answer. 
As your sin has hitherto kept you back, let the 
Blood now bring you nigh and give you the power 
to abide. The Blood has put away the thought of 
sin from God. He remembers it no more forever. 
The Blood has put away the thought of sin in me 
too, the evil conscience that condemns me. The 
better things which the Blood speaks in heaven it 
speaks in my heart too. 

1 6th. — The truth of Jesus' heavenly Priesthood 
is so often powerless because we look upon it as 
an external, distant thing, a work going on in heaven 
above us. The one cure is to know that our Great 
Priest over the house of God, — and we are His 
house too, — is the glorified Jesus, who makes His 
presence and power in heaven by the Holy Spirit, 
to be as real within us here, as it is above us there. 

There are seasons for Bible reading, prayer, 
church-going. But how speedily and naturally the 



I48 NOVEMBER. 

heart turns to worldy things. It is not the worship 
of a true heart. God asks the affection, the will ; 
the head and the heart are in partnership, but the 
heart must lead. Our religion has been too much 
of the head, — hearing, reading, thinking. Draw 
nigh, it never says with a clear head, but with a 
true heart. 

The action of the Blood in heaven is increasing. 
Even so will it be in the soul that enters in to live 
amid the cares, engagements, companionships of 
daily life in an inner sanctuary, where everything 
acts in the power of the upper world. 

17th. — There are outer court Christians, Israel- 
ites who trust in Christ who died on Calvary. 
Beyond these are Christian priests who know the 
power of the Blood for service. Then come those 
high priests who know that the Holy Spirit ap- 
plies the Blood in such power, that it indeed brings 
to the life in the inner sanctuary, in the full and 
abiding joy of God's presence. 

The surrender of all becomes only possible, when 
the soul sees how truly Jesus engages to put His 
own delight in God's law into the heart, to give the 
will, and the strength to live in all God's will. 

Faith accepts the promise in its divine reality ; 
Hope goes forward to examine and rejoice in the 
treasures which Faith has accepted. Faith will per- 



NOVEMBER. I49 

haps most be tried, when God wants most to bless. 
Hope is the daughter of Faith, the messenger, it 
sends out to see what is to come. It is Hope that 
becomes the strength and support of Faith. 

THE LORD'S SUPPER. 

18th. — One chief cause why some do not grow 
more in grace, is that they do not take time to hold 
converse with the Lord in secret. Christians, give 
yourselves, give your Lord time to transfer His 
heavenly thoughts to your inner, spiritual life. 
Take time to remain before Him, until He has made 
His Word living and powerful in your souls. Then 
does it become the life and power of your life. 

Books can become a blessing to the reader, only 
when they bring him always to that portion of God's 
Word, which is treated of, in order that he may 
meditate further upon it himself, and receive it for 
himself, as from the mouth of God. 

19th. — To find food for angels: for this only one 
word was necessary. But to prepare for man a 
banquet upon this accursed earth, a banquet of 
heavenly food, — that cost God much. Nothing less 
than the life and blood of His Son, to take away the 
curse and open up to them the right and the access 
to heavenly blessings. 



150 NOVEMBER. 

The greater the work is that a man undertakes, 
the more important is the preparation. Four days 
before the Passover, the Israelite had to make his 
preparations. The Lord Jesus also desired that care 
should be taken to obtain an upper room, furnished 
and ready, where the Passover might be prepared. 
When I am called upon to meet my God and to sit 
down at His table, I will see to it that I do not ap- 
proach it unprepared. 

20th. — Great thoughts of Jesus and large ex- 
pectations of what His love will do, will set the heart 
aglow and be the best preparation for meeting Him- 
self. To have a deep-rooted renunciation of my- 
self, in order to be willing to live through Jesus 
alone, — this is the attitude of a soul which leads to 
a blessed observance of the Supper. 

Even as the little weak infant, that does not know 
how to eat, is fed by its mother's hand, so will Jesus 
break for me the bread of heaven, and impart to me 
what I have need of. 

2 1 st. — There is nothing on earth that awakens 
love and rouses it to activity so powerfully, as the 
thought of being desired and loved. Jesus' desire is 
toward me. Believe and ponder this wonderful 
thought, until you feel drawn with overmastering 
force, to give yourself over to Jesus, for the satis- 



NOVEMBER. 151 

faction of His desire toward you: then shall you, too, 
be satisfied. 

22nd. — The more the believer really despairs of 
himself, the more glorious will Christ become in his 
eyes. The more keenly he feels every sin, the more 
will Jesus become to him. Every sin is a need that 
calls for Jesus. By the confession of sin, you point 
out to Him the spot w T here you are wounded and 
where He must exhibit the healing power of His 
blood. Every sin that you confess, is an acknowl- 
edgment of something which Jesus must cast out, 
and the place of which He is bound to fill up with 
one of the lovely gifts of His holiness. Every sin, 
that you confess, is a new reason, why you should 
believe more and ask more, and a new reason, why 
Jesus should bless you. 

The very same light that enables you to feel the 
curse of sin more deeply, enables you also to dis- 
cern the perfect and final victory over it. The ex- 
perience utterly lost, prepares the way for the ex- 
perience utterly redeemed. 

23rd. — The sin offering, by which atonement was 
made, was the type of the sacrifice of Christ alone. 
"He was made sin for us." The burnt offering, 
which had to be wholly consumed by lire on the 
altar, as a symbol of entire devotedness to the 
service of God, was the type alike, of the sacrifice of 



152 NOVEMBER. 

Christ and of the sacrifice of believers, in which they 
surrender themselves to the Lord. The idea of thank 
offering is exhibited more fully to the apprehension, 
in the feast of thank offering and in the fellowship 
that ensued. 

24th. — Of the sin offering, by which atonement 
was made, the priests might eat, as a token of their 
fellowship with God through the atonement. The 
Lord's Supper is our fellowship in the perfect sacri- 
fice of Jesus Christ which has done away with sin 
forever. Of the thank offering in which dedication 
to God was shown forth, the offerer himself might 
also eat, in recognition of his fellowship with God 
in this dedication. The Lord's Supper is a com- 
munion with Christ, not only because He offered 
Himself up for us, but because in and with Him, 
we offer ourselves to the Father, with all that we 
have. 

My Saviour, do Thou Thyself come into me: my 
faith can only be the fruit, of what Thou givest me 
to know of Thyself. 

25th. — He loves us so dearly that He sets great 
store by our love. Our love is to Him, His happi- 
ness and joy: He requires it from us with a holy 
strictness. So truly has the eternal Love chosen us, 
that it longs to live in our remembrance every day. 
Thou knowest, Lord, it is not by any force my heart 
can be taught to remember Thee. 



NOVEMBER. I53 

If by Thy love Thou dwellest in me, thinking of 
Thee becomes a joy, — no effort or trouble, but the 
sweetest rest. 

When I hear the glad tidings that Christ died 
for sin, I obtain courage to say : Sin is mine, and 
Christ, who died for sin, died also for me. When 
I first look on sin, 1 can make bold to say that 
Christ is mine. The forgiveness of sin is, as it were, 
the pledge of entrance into the whole riches of the 
grace of God. 

26th.-— All knowledge of the truth, and all ac- 
quaintance with the Gospel, are of no avail without 
the personal appropriation of that short phrase, — 
For me. And that word of man has, on the other 
hand, its foundation in the word of Jesus, "For 
you!' 

As by the circulation of the blood, every member 
of our body is kept unceasingly in the most vital 
connection with the others, so the body of Christ 
can increase and become strong only when, in the 
loving interchange of the fellowship of the Spirit 
and of love, the life of the Head can flow unhindered 
from member to member. 

27th. — To be thankful for what I have received, 
and for what my Lord has prepared, is the surest 
way to receive more. A joyful, thankful Christian 



154 NOVEMBER. 

shows that God can make those who serve Him 
truly happy. He stirs up others to praise God 
along with him. If my Saviour went singing from 
the Lord's Table to the conflict in Gethsemane, 
may I, in the joy of His redemption, follow Him 
with thanksgiving into every conflict to which He 
calls me. The nearer to the throne of God, the 
more thanksgiving. In heaven they praise God day 
and night: a Lord's Supper, pervaded by the spirit 
of thanksgiving, is a foretaste of it. 

28th. — Life must be fed with life. In corn, the 
life of nature is hid, and we enjoy the power of that 
life in bread. It was to make heavenly life ac- 
cessible to us that the Son of God died like the seed 
corn in the earth, that His body was broken like the 
bread grain. It is to communicate this life to us and 
to make it our own, that He gives Himself to us in 
the Supper. 

29th. — "I have meat to eat that ye know not of." 
Jesus had a hidden manna that he received from the 
Father, and that was the secret of His w r onderful 
power. The nutriment of His life, He received from 
God in heaven. The doing of God's will was for 
Jesus, the bread of heaven; and since I have now 
received Jesus Himself as my heavenly bread, He 
teaches me to eat what He Himself ate: He teaches 
me to do the will of God. 



NOVEMBER. 1 55 

It was when Abraham returned from the cam- 
paign for the deliverance of Lot, that Melchisedek, 
the priest of the Most High God, set before him 
bread and wine. 'To him that overcometh," — says 
Jesus, — to him that works and strives and over- 
comes, — "will I give to eat of the hidden manna." 
Heavenly food brings heavenly strength, and 
heavenly strength brings heavenly work. 

30th. — It is one of the characteristics of God's 
work, that with Him the end is as certain as the 
beginning. He has sought me and made me His 
own, and what He has thus done to me, points 
back to that which He did for me: He gave His 
own Son, and by His blood He bought for Him- 
self as His own possession. And that again points 
back to eternity. He chose me and loved me before 
the foundation of the world. My soul, ponder what 
this means: "He has begun." Then shalt thou be 
able joyfully to exclaim, "the Lord will perfect that 
w^hich concerneth me." 



DECEMBER. 

CHILDREN FOR CHRIST. 

ist. — It is where parents love the Lord, their God, 
with all their heart and strength, that the human 
love will be strengthened and sanctified. It is only 
parents who are willing to live really consecrated 
lives, entirely given up to God, to whom the promise 
and the blessing can come fully true. 

An angel of the Lord had appeared to Manoah's 
wife to predict the birth of Samson; this angel's 
name was Wonderful. This is still the name of the 
parent's God. 

2nd. — Not only does the child, in his tenderness 
and lovingness call forth the love of your heart, his 
waywardness and wilfulness call for it still more, as 
they put it to the test and school it in forbearance 
and gentleness. 

Children that are allowed to be unruly and self- 
willed will speedily lose their child-like faith. What 
is said of men that having thrust from them a good 
conscience, they have made shipwreck of the faith, 
holds good of children too. 



DECEMBER. 157 

3rd. — Now with the Bible of God's grace, and 
then, with the books of God's glory in nature, the 
whole of the day, and the whole of the life is to be 
an uninterrupted fellowship with the Holy One. 
The continued and spontaneous outburstings of the 
heart, in the language of the life, to prove that 
God's presence and love are a reality and a delight. 
This is the source: — "Thou shalt love the Lord with 
all thy heart, and the words shall be in thy heart, 
and thou shalt teach them diligently to thy children, 
and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine 
house, and when thou walkest by the way, when 
thou liest down and when thou risest up." 



4th. — Many parents never understand the truth, 
that to train for God's service secures the fullest 
salvation. God says of Abraham, "I have kno^n 
him, to the end he may command his children, that 
they may keep the way of the Lord." Remember 
Pharaoh's words, "Go ye, serve the Lord, let your 
little ones also go with you." 

5th. — The secret of home rule is self rule, first 
being ourselves what we want our children to be. 
A calm stillness of soul that seeks to be guided by 
God's Spirit, is one of the first conditions of suc- 
cess in our own spiritual life, and so in the sacred 
influence we wish to exert on our children. 



158 DECEMBER. 

6th. — Of old, God sought above everything to 
train His saints to be men of faith. Faith is the 
soul's surrender to God. It begins with faith in 
His Word. In an age of doubt and questioning, 
teach your child to accept what it cannot under- 
stand, even what appears mysterious and contrary 
to reason, because God who is wise and great has 
said it. The child wants to trust, the Word wants 
to be trusted, let your unfeigned faith bring them 
into contact. 

7th. — Christ's healing w r ork is spoken of as the 
natural result of His atoning work, of which Isaiah 
had spoken as a bearing of our sickness. Isa. 53 ; 
Matt. 8. He left, among the exceeding great and 
precious promises, w^hieh are the riches of His 
church, the assurance that the prayer of faith would 
save the sick. He has a thousand times over by 
His Spirit led His children, — applying the promise 
of His doing whatsoever we will if we abide in Him, 
— to believe and receive the healing of a sick child. 

8th. — Mother, God gives you this picture of 
Elizabeth and her child of promise: — 'Thou shalt 
have joy and gladness and many shall rejoice at 
his birth, for he shall be great in the sight of the 
Lord," — three marks of a child born under the 
covering of the Holy Spirit. Among men he may 
not make a name, in -gifts and talents he may not 



DECEMBER. 159 

be great, but great he will be in the sight of Him 
who sees not as man sees. He will be a vessel God 
can use for His work, a true way preparer for the 
coming of the Lord in His Kingdom. 

9th. — "Weep not, she is not dead, but sleepeth." 
Jesus draws near the lifeless form of each little one, 
over whom a mother's heart is weeping, to remind 
her that death has been conquered, and that the 
loved one is not dead, in the terrible meaning which 
sin gave that word, but truly sleeps in that deep and 
blessed sense which that word now has in His 
mouth. There is a better life than the life of this 
earth — the eternal life in which God dwelleth. He 
took this little one that He might draw thee heaven- 
ward, that He might empty thy heart to make more 
room for Himself, that thou mightest be drawn to 
Him in thy need, and be prepared for receiving the 
new revelation He has to give of His power, His 
love, Himself and thy life. 

10th. — The Syrophenician woman believed and 
triumphed with one weapon, — more prayer, more 
trust. Mother, pleading for your prodigal child, 
you have her example, and a thousand words of 
promise and a revelation of the Father's will and the 
Saviour's power and love, such as she never had. 
In the face of all doubts, claim the promise of an 
answer to prayer in the name of Jesus. Yield your- 



l6o DECEMBER. 

self to the Holy Spirit, to have everything brought 
to the light that you must cast out. Trust not the 
wrestling urgency of your petition; seek your 
strength in God's promise and faithfulness, in His 
power and love. 

nth. — It is as the parents serve God upon the 
Sabbath, in the beauty of holiness, and as the spirit 
of holiness breathes on, and from them, in the 
services of the Sabbath, as that day is to them, not 
a day of strict observance, but of joyful worship, of 
real loving fellowship with God, as it is a delight, 
that the first condition will be fulfilled for teaching 
their children to love it. 

12th. — God's highest gift to creation was His 
will, that man might choose the will of his God. 
Obedience is the path to liberty. Parents often say 
that to develop the will of the child, the will must 
be left free. The will of the child is not free, — 
passion and prejudice, selfishness and ignorance, 
seek to influence the child in the wrong direction. 
Your highest work is to be God's minister in lead- 
ing your child's will back to His service. To know 
to refuse the evil and choose the good, will be to 
choose Christ, and holiness, and eternal life. 

13th. — It is because the Christian parent too little 
realizes, that ruling his house well is a simple mat- 



DECEMBER. l6l 

ter of duty, a command that must be obeyed, that 
so many children are ruined by parental weakness. 
Not to restrain the child is to dishonor God by 
honoring the child more than God, because the duty 
God has imposed, is made to give way to the child's 
will. 

14th. — "Only believe." Living faith will teach 
us to see new beauty and preciousness in our chil- 
dren, will waken in us new earnestness and desire, 
in everything to hold and to train them for God 
alone. The name of "Faith Home" has been ap- 
propriated to certain special institutions ; we shall 
boldly claim it as the name of our own dear home, 
because everything is done in the faith of Jesus. 

15th. — God asks and expects us in doing our 
work as parents, in every way to copy Him. God's 
fatherhood is our model and study. In the tender- 
ness and patience, and self-sacrifice of the Divine 
Love, in the firmness and righteousness of Divine 
rule, the parent will find the secret of successful 
training. In a Christian father, a child ought to 
have a better exposition, than the best of sermons 
can give, of the love and care of the Heavenly 
Father, and all the blessing and joy He wants to 
bestow. 

1 6th. — The branch is a perfect likeness of the 
vine; the only difference is, the one is great and 



l62 DECEMBER. 

strong, and the source of strength, the other little 
and feeble, ever needing and receiving strength. 
Even so the believer is the perfect likeness of Christ 
— The True Vine. 

17th. — How can we glorify God? Not by adding 
to His glory or bringing Him any new glory. In 
a vine bearing much fruit, the owner is glorified, as 
it tells of his skill and care. In the disciple who 
bears much fruit, the Father is glorified. Before 
men and angels, proof is given of the glory of God's 
grace and power; God's glory shines out through 
him. — The True Vine. 

MONEY. 

1 8th. — We ask how much a man gives. Christ 
asks how much he keeps. We ask what does a man 
own? Christ, how does he use it? The world 
thinks more about the money getting: Christ, about 
the money giving. The world looks at the money 
and its amount; Christ at the man and his motive. 
We look at the gift; Christ asks was the gift a 
sacrifice? 

19th. — If our Lord wanted us to give Him all, 
like the poor widow who cast her farthing into the 
treasury, why did he not leave a clear command? 
That would be the spirit of the world in the church, 



DECEMBER. 163 

looking at zvhat we give, at our giving all. We 
must put all at His feet, as the spontaneous ex- 
pression of a love, that cannot help giving, just be- 
cause it loves. 

20th. — If we did but see the Lord Jesus in charge 
of the Heavenly Mint, stamping every true gift and 
then using it for the Kingdom, surely our money 
would begin to shine with a new lustre. We should 
begin to say — the less I can spend on myself, and 
the more on my Lord, the richer I am. Day by 
day, give as God blesses and as He asks — it will 
help to bring heaven nearer to you, and you nearer 
to heaven. 

2 1 st. — One of the ways of manifesting and main- 
taining the crucifixion of the flesh, is never to use 
money to gratify it. The way to conquer every 
temptation to do so, is to have the heart filled with 
large thoughts of the spiritual power of money. 

How many count themselves really liberal, be- 
cause of what they will while what they do, even 
up to their present means is not what God would 
love to see. 

22nd. — When you lie down at night, weary, the 
bed holds you up and allows you to stretch out your 
whole body and to rest there. God, the Everlasting 
One, stretches out His arms and says: — "Now, soul, 



164 DECEMBER. 

come and rest." He will take you up individually. 
The Father is very near, not a general father and 
God of the universe, but a special Father for every 
child of His. — Miscellaneous. 

23rd. — Do you believe that if God had sent an 
angel to whisper every moment in your ear: "The 
Everlasting God is keeping you," you would then 
have understood how you were to be kept? You 
have something better than an angel. God has 
actually given His Holy Spirit into your hearts to 
keep you always in remembrance of the presence 
of Jesus, so that you can every minute be kept 
trusting Him. — Miscellaneous. 

24th. — The experience of the love and the saving 
power of our incarnate, crucified, glorified Lord 
depends entirely upon His indwelling in us to re- 
veal His presence and to do His work. The Lord 
Jesus brings the heart which accepts and trusts 
Him to dwell within, into sympathy and harmony 
with Himself. He becomes your life. He will live 
in you, and all your thoughts, and tempers, and 
dispositions, and actions will have His Life and 
Spirit breathing in them. 

25th. — Jesus was born twice. The birth at Beth- 
lehem was a birth into a life of weakness. The 
second time, He was born from the grave — "the 



DECEMBER. 165 

first born from the dead/' Because He gave up 
His first life, that He had by His first birth, God 
gave Him the life of the second birth, in the glory 
of Heaven and the throne of God. 

Jesus' heart toward us is all love. His work was, 
and is nothing but the revelation of infinite love and 
tenderness, and nothing but love on our part can 
be the proof, that we have really accepted and 
known His love. 

26th. — To do God's will Christ came from 
heaven ; to do God's w r ill in you He has entered 
your heart. God gave us a will, that with it we 
might intelligently will what He wills. 

When Christ comes in to take possession, He will 
by His Spirit within, make you what God w T ould 
have you be — comformable to the image of His 
Son. Christ's life is altogether too high and too 
divine for us to reproduce. It is His own life, and 
only His, but He will live it out in us. 

HAVE MERCY UPON ME. 

27th. — Not what a man does or brings, although 
it is apparently the performance of the Law, but the 
childlike disposition of loving subjection, is the true 
fulfilling of the Law. The worth of our religion 
depends wholly upon our relation to God. 



l66 DECEMBER. 

In the midst of all its working and praying, the 
little child has always the hidden sense of the moth- 
er's nearness. The Christian can attain to being so 
closely knit to his God, that in the midst of the 
severe activities of earth, there may always remain 
the blessed feeling, "My God sees me, and I can 
look up unto Him." 

28th. — The joy of forgiveness will not always re- 
main, unless it be confirmed as the joy of sanctifi- 
cation. When the first joy began to yield, many a 
Christian has ascribed the loss to God, as a trial 
which he has sent him. Had he but asked for grace, 
not only to be washed from guilt, but also to be lib- 
erated from the dominion of sin, he would have 
found that with the progressive work of grace in 
the soul, a progressive joy would have been minis- 
tered unto him by God. 

29th. — The more that you cleave to God, and 
commit yourself to His Word and counsel, the more 
steadfast shall you stand. Let the Word be your 
food. Strive by it to think what God thinks, to will 
what He wills. If the Word of God is thus the rock 
of your confidence, you will be just as little moved, 
as there is variableness or shadow of turning with 
God. 

30th. — The Law of God guards the entrance to the 
gate of heaven. It will let no one within, who is not 



DECEMBER. 167 

whiter than the snow. "Wash me and I shall be 
whiter than snow." Nothing less than this God has 
offered us, nothing less than this can bring us full 
peace. Alas! how many are seeking peace in their 
own activity, endeavors, experiences, but they can- 
not find the stable, full peace which Jesus gives and 
which passeth all understanding. 

31st. — The book of Psalms God offers us as a 
Prayer Book, adapted to our need, because the pray- 
ers come from His Spirit and are therefore divine ; 
and yet just as genuinely human, because they come 
from those who are our flesh and blood, and are in 
everything like ourselves. With the infant class 
learning the "A B C," the teacher puts the sounds 
into their mouth. In the Psalms, the Lord God 
puts into our mouths the very words with which, we 
may come to Him. 



THE TWO COVENANTS. 

i. — It is often said that the great aim of the 
preacher ought to be to translate Scripture truth 
from its Jewish form into the language and the 
thought of the nineteenth century, and so to make 
it intelligible to our ordinary Christians. In the 
translation the force of the original is lost. The 
scholar who trusts to translations will never become 
a master of the language he wants to learn. A race 
of Christians will be raised up, to whom the lan- 
guage of God's Word, and with that the God who 
spoke it, will be strange. In the Scripture words 
not a little of Scripture truth will be lost. For the 
true Christian life nothing is so healthful and in- 
vigorating as to have each man study for himself 
the very words in which the Holy Ghost has 
spoken. 

2. — As long as we expect God to do for us 
what we ask or think, we limit Him. When we be- 
lieve that as high as the heavens are above the earth, 
His thoughts are above our thoughts, and wait on 
Him as God to do unto us according to His word, 
as He means, we shall live the truly supernatural, 
heavenly life the Holy Spirit can work in us — the 
true Christ life. 



THE TWO COVENANTS. 169 

3. — The first great work of God with man was 
to get him to believe. All the dealings with indi- 
viduals, and with Israel, had just this one object. 
Where He found faith He could do anything. Un- 
belief was the root of disobedience and every sin, it 
made it impossible for God to do His work. The 
one thing God sought to waken in men by promise 
and threatening, by mercy and judgment, was faith. 

4. — As often as we see men engaged in their 
earthly pursuits in search of money, pleasure, fame, 
or power with their whole heart, shall we not ask, 
Is this the Spirit in which Christians consider that 
God must be served? Is not this the one thing 
needful in our religion. 

5. — God made two Covenants — because there 
were two parties concerned. In the first, man was 
to prove what he could do, and what he was. In 
the second, God would show what He would do. 
The former was the time of needed preparation ; 
the latter, of Divine fulfilment. The one difference 
between Old and New is, that in the New every- 
thing is to be done by God Himself. The Old 
Covenant was necessary to waken man's desires, to 
call forth his efforts, to deepen the dependence on 
God, to convince of his sin and impotence, and so to 
prepare him to feel the need oi salvation, that sin, 
by the commandment, might appear exceeding sin- 



I70 THE TWO COVENANTS. 

ful. How could God make a covenant of which He 
knew that man could not keep it? All education, 
Divine or human, ever deals with its pupils on the 
principle — faithfulness in the less is essential to the 
attainment of the greater. God dealt with Israel, 
as men in whom, there was still a conscience to 
judge of good and evil, a heart capable of being 
stirred to long after God, and a will to choose the 
good and Himself. Before Christ and His salva- 
tion could be understood, these faculties had to be 
wakened. In the provision made in the law for a 
symbolical atonement and pardon, in all God's reve- 
lation of Himself through priest, and prophet, and 
king, everything was done to win His people, and to 
give force to the appeal to their self-interest or their 
gratitude, their fear or their love. The Old Covenant 
is called a ministration of condemnation and death, 
not because there was no grace in it — it had its own 
glory (2 Cor. iii. 10-12) — but because the law, with 
its curse, was the predominating element. The two 
aspects we find with especial clearness in Paul's 
epistles. So he speaks of all, who are of the works 
of the law, as under the curse (Gal. iii. 10). Then, 
almost immediately after, he speaks of the law as 
our schoolmaster unto Christ, into whose charge, 
as to a tutor, we had been given until the time ap- 
pointed of the Father. 

6. — God would teach us by the Covenants the 



THE TWO COVENANTS. 171 

two great lessons of Sin and of Holiness. As the 
one demand of the First Covenant was the sense of 
sin, that of the New, is faith that that need, created 
by the discipline of God's law, will be met in a 
Divine and supernatural way. 

7. — In the Old Covenant man's heart was not 
right with God. In the New Covenant the central 
promise is a heart delighting in God's law, and hold- 
ing fellowship with Him. In our heart, there are 
no chambers in which the law can be put, while the 
seat of the heart can be given up to other things ; 
the heart is a unity. 

8. — At Sinai, the tables of the Covenant were of 
stone, as a lasting substance. The stone was wholly 
set apart to carry and show this Divine writing. It 
and the stone were inseparably connected. So the 
heart in which God writes His law in power, lives 
only and wholly to carry that writing, and is un- 
changeably identified with it. 

9. — The pardon of sin is the root of all blessing. 
Having God as our God and the Divine teaching 
are the fruit. The tree itself is the law in the heart. 

10. — The whole Old Covenant was dependent on 
man's faithfulness: "The Lord keepeth covenant 
with them that keep His commandments." Noth- 



172 THE TWO COVENANTS. 

ing could help man until the "If ye shall diligently 
keep" of the law was replaced by the promise, "I 
will put My Spirit in you, and ye shall keep My 
judgments." 

ii. — The great sin of Israel under the Old Cove- 
nant was this: "They limited the Holy One." Under 
the New Covenant there is no less danger of this 
sin. His oath is an end of all fear or doubt. 

12. — Let me say to all, fain to believe fully: 
Cherish every whisper of the conscience and of the 
Spirit that convinces of sin. Whatever it be, a hasty 
temper, a sharp word, an unloving or impatient 
thought, anything of selfishness or self-will — cherish 
that which condemns it in you, as part of the school- 
ing to bring you to Christ and the full possession of 
His salvation. 

13. — The Book contained all the conditions of 
the Covenant; only through the Book could the 
people know all that God asked of them, and all 
that they might ask of Him. The Bible is the Book 
of the Covenant. 

14. — What loss the Church is suffering because 
so few believers truly live as the heirs of the New 
Covenant, in the true knowledge and enjoyment of 
its promises. 



THE TWO COVENANTS. 173 

15. — Between what God has already wrought in 
us, and what He waits to work, obedience is the 
blessed link. 

16. — Why have so many believers seen so< little of 
the beauty of this New Covenant life, with its power 
of holy and joyful obedience? The Lord was with 
the disciples, but "their eyes were holden that they 
knew Him not." It is with many as with Elisha's 
servant: all heaven is around them and they know 
it not. Nothing will help but the prayer, "Lord, 
open their eyes, that they may see." 

17. — To be jealous with God's jealousy, for God's 
honor, and rise up against sin, is the gate into the 
Covenant of an everlasting priesthood, is the secret 
of being entrusted by God with the sacred work of 
teaching His people, and burning incense before 
Him, and turning many from iniquity (Deu. xxxiii. 
8-1 1, cf. ; Ex. xxxii. 26-29; Num. xxv. 10-13; Mai. 
ii. 6). 

18. — We should serve Him. My servant does 
not serve me by spending all his time in getting 
himself ready for work, but in doing my work. 

19. — Galatians shows the difference between the 
two Covenants in three things: (1) The law and its 
works are contrasted with the hearing of faith ; (2) 



174 THE TWO COVENANTS. 

the flesh and its religion with the flesh crucified; 
(3) the impotence to good with a walk in the liberty 
and the power of the Spirit. 

20. — Because in the New Covenant, obedience 
no longer occupies the place it had in the Old, as 
the condition of the Covenant, many are under the 
impression that obedience is now no longer as indis- 
pensable. The New Covenant comes not to provide 
a substitute for absolute obedience in faith, but 
through faith to secure the obedience, by giving a 
heart that delights in it, and has the power for it. 
Men abuse the free grace, that without our own 
obedience accepts us for a life of new obedience, 
when they rest content with the grace, without the 
obedience it is meant for. 

21. — The indispensable necessity of obedience ex- 
plains why so often the entrance into the full enjoy- 
ment of the New Covenant has depended upon some 
single act of surrender. Faith could not lay hold of 
the blessing until the soul consented to regard this 
little thing as the test of its surrender to obey in 
everything, and of its faith that in everything the 
Surety of the Covenant would give the power. 

22. — There is a twofold work of the Spirit: one in 
giving a holy disposition and character, the other in 
qualifying and empowering a man for work. The 



THE TWO COVENANTS. 1 75 

former must always come first. The promise that 
the disciples should receive the Holy Spirit for their 
service, was very definitely given to those who had 
followed and loved Christ, and kept His command- 
ments. 

23. — The minister of the Spirit must specially see 
to it that he lead men to the Holy Spirit. Men may 
become too dependent upon him, may take his Scrip- 
ture teaching at second-hand. The New Covenant 
is: "They shall no longer every man teach his 
brother, know the Lord, for all shall know Me, from 
the least even to the greatest." 

24. — The minister of the Spirit, very definitely 
and perseveringly, points away from himself to the 
Spirit. This is what John the Baptist did. Christ 
did the same. In His farewell discourse, He called 
His disciples to turn from His personal instruction 
to the inward teaching of the Holy Spirit. 

25. — The two most remarkable chapters in the 
Bible on the preaching of the Gospel are those in 
which Paul expounds the secret of his teaching 
(1 Cor. ii. ; 2 Cor. iii.). Every minister ought to see 
whether he can pass his examination in them. 



THE SCHOOL OF OBEDIENCE. 

1 

I. — As we see where, and how often, and in what 
connections, a Bible word, or a truth of the Chris- 
tian life is found, its relative importance may be 
apprehended as well as its bearing on the whole of 
revelation. 

2. — Obedience is the one virtue of Paradise, the 
one condition of man's abiding there, the one thing 
his Creator asks. Nothing is said of faith, or hu- 
mility, or love: obedience includesall. From Para- 
dise lost to Paradise regained, it is only obedience 
that gives access to the tree of life and the favor of 
God (Gen. ii. 16; iii. n; Rev. xxii. 14; xii. 17; 
xiv. 12). 

3. — With any new beginning in the history of 
God's Kingdom, obedience always comes into spe- 
cial prominence. Take Noah, the new father of the 
human race: "According to all that God com- 
manded Noah, so did he" (Gen. vi. 22; vii. 5, 9, 16). 
It is the man who does what God commands to 
whom God can entrust His work, whom God can 
use to be a saviour of men. 

Think of Abraham, the father of the chosen race. 
"By faith he obeyed" (Heb. xi. 7). When he had 



THE SCHOOL OF OBEDIENCE. 1 77 

been forty years in this school of faith — obedience, 
God came to perfect his faith, and to crown it with 
His fullest blessing. Nothing could fit him for this 
but a crowning act of obedience. When he had 
bound his son on the altar, God said, "In thy seed 
shall all nations be blessed, because thou hast 
obeyed My voice" (Gen. xxii. 12, 18). And to Isaac 
He spake (xxvi. 3, 5), "I will perform the oath 
which I sware to Abraham, because that Abraham 
obeyed My voice." 

4. — At Sinai, God gave Moses the message to the 
people (Ex. xix. 4), "If you will obey My voice, ye 
shall be a peculiar treasure to Me, above all people." 
In the last three chapters of Exodus you have the 
expression nineteen times, "According to all the 
Lord commanded Moses, so did he." And then, 
"The glory of the Lord filled the tabernacle." 
Again, in Lev. viii. and ix., you have, with refer- 
ence to the consecration of the priests and the taber- 
nacle, the same expression twelve times. 

5. — Our great need is more of God. 

6. — Read Deuteronomy. No book uses the word 
"obey" so frequently, or speaks so much of the 
blessing obedience will assuredly bring. The whole 
is summed up in the words (xi. 27), "I set before 



I78 THE SCHOOL OF OBEDIENCE. 

you a blessing, if ye obey; a curse, if ye will not 
obey." 

7. — Beware of praying only for a blessing. Let 
us care for the obedience, God will care for the 
blessing. 

8. — God sums up all His dealings with the fathers 
in one word, "I spake not with them concerning 
sacrifices ; but this I commanded them, 'Obey My 
voice, and I will be your God.' " 

9. — In the Sermon on the Mount Christ began 
with obedience: No one could enter the kingdom, 
"but he that doeth the will of My Father. ,, In the 
farewell discourse (John 14, 15, 16, 21 23), no words 
could express more simply or more powerfully the 
glorious place Christ gives to obedience, with its 
twofold possibility ; as only possible to a loving 
heart, as making possible all that God has to give of 
His Holy Spirit, of His wonderful love, of His in- 
dwelling in Christ Jesus. I know of no Scripture 
that gives a higher revelation of the spiritual life, 
or the power of loving obedience, as its one condi- 
tion. 

10. — Peter says, "God hath given His Holy Spirit 
to them that obey Him," and "We must obey God 
rather than man." The preparation for Pentecost 



THE SCHOOL OF OBEDIENCE. 179 

was the surrender to Christ; on the manward side, 
obedience is to be unto death; nothing dare hinder 
it in the man given to God. 

1 1 . — It was for "the obedience of faith among all 
nations," that Paul was made an apostle. He speaks 
of what God had wrought "to make the Gentiles 
obedient." He teaches us that we become "the ser- 
vants of obedience unto righteousness" (Rom. i. 5 ; 
xvi. 26). 

12. — James warns us not to be hearers of the 
Word only, but doers, and expounds how Abraham 
was justified, and his faith perfected, by his works. 

13. — Peter speaks to the "elect unto obedience" 
(1 Peter i. 2). He points to it as the eternal pur- 
pose of the Father, the great object of the work of 
the Spirit, and a chief part of the salvation of Christ. 
In verse 13 he writes, "As children of obedience," 
born of it, and marked by it, "Be ye holy in all man- 
ner of conversation." In verse 22 we read, "Seeing 
ye have purified your souls in your obedience to the 
truth," — the whole acceptance of the truth of God 
was not merely a matter of intellectual assent or 
strong emotion; it was the subjection of the life to 
the dominion of the truth of God. 

14. — With John, obedience is the one certificate 



l8o THE SCHOOL OF OBEDIENCE. 

of Christian character. "He that saith I know Him, 
and keepeth not His commandments, is a liar." 
"Let us love in deed and truth ; hereby we shall 
assure our hearts before Him." "Whatsoever we 
ask, we receive of Him, because we keep His com- 
mandments." Obedience is the secret of a good 
conscience, and of the confidence that God heareth 
us. "This is the love of God, that we keep His 
commandments." This obedience is the garment 
in which the hidden love reveals itself. 

15. — Sin had made us believe it a humiliation 
always to be seeking God's will. We knew not that 
the beauty, the unspotted purity of the robe of crea- 
ture-hood was its obedience. Christ put on that 
robe to show us how to wear it, and with it, enter 
into the presence and glory of God. 

16. — The object of Christ's obedience was three- 
fold: — As an Example, to show us what true obe- 
dience was ; as our Surety, by His obedience to fulfill 
all righteousness for us ; as our Head, to prepare a 
new and obedient nature to impart to us. 

17. — The one likeness between Adam and his 
seed was disobedience ; the one resemblance between 
Christ and His seed, obedience. "Whosoever shall 
do the will of My Father, is My brother, and sister, 
and mother." The link in a family is, a common 



THE SCHOOL OF OBEDIENCE. l8l 

life shared by all and a family likeness. The bond 
between Christ and us is, that He and we together 
do the will of God. 

18. — In Christ obedience was a life principle, "I 
come to do Thy will, O God." It was a joy, "I de- 
light to do Thy will, O God." "My meat is to do 
the will of Him that sent Me." Food is the one 
necessary of life. Doing the will of God satisfied 
His hunger, and made Him glad. David meant 
this, when he spoke of God's words being "sweeter 
than honey." This obedience led to a waiting on 
God's will. "The Son can do nothing of Himself, 
but what He seeth the Father do ; for the Father 
showeth the Son all things, that Himself doeth." 
"As I hear, I judge." The secret of a true and con- 
tinual obedience is close and continual fellowship 
zvith God, and continual teaching. This obedience 
was unto death, and sprang from the deepest hu- 
mility. "Have this mind in you, which was also in 
Christ Jesus, who humbled Himself, becoming obe- 
dient to death" (Phil. ii. 8). It was of faith— in 
entire dependence upon God's strength. "The 
father that dwelleth in Me, doeth the works." 

19. — From the commencement of His public life 
to its close, Christ lived by the Word of God. "It 
is written" was the word with which He conquered 
Satan. "The Spirit of the Lord God is upon Me" 



l82 THE SCHOOL OF OBEDIENCE. 

was the consciousness with which He opened His 
preaching. "That the Scripture might be fulfilled" 
was the light in which He gave Himself to the 
death. After the resurrection, He expounded "in 
all the Scriptures the things concerning Himself. ,, 

20. — Paul writes, "I lie not, my conscience bear- 
ing me witness in the Holy Ghost." The Holy 
Ghost speaks through conscience; He is the Voice 
of God. 

21. — In intercession, more than in the zeal which 
works in its own strength with little prayer, the 
highest type of piety, the true Christ-likeness, is 
cultivated. 

22. — Cherish carefully the consciousness of "doing 
unto the Lord," of being a servant simply carrying 
out orders ; your work will then not come between 
you and Christ, but link you inseparably to Him, 
His strength, and His approval. 

23. — Doing God's will is the only key to the 
knowledge of God's truth. Obedience on earth is 
the key to a place in God's love in heaven. 

24. — There is a general will of God for all His 
children, which we can, in some measure, learn out 
of the Bible ; but there is a special, individual appli- 
cation of these commands — God's will concerning 



THE SCHOOL OF OBEDIENCE. 183 

each of us personally, which only the Holy Spirit 
can teach. 



25. — Give yourself to Him, not to be saved from 
disobedience, that now you may be happy, and live 
your own life without sinning and trouble. No; 
but that He may have you wholly for Himself, as a 
vessel which He can fill with Himself, with His life 
and love for men. 

26. — Write with invisible fluid and nothing can 
be seen. Tell a man of it, and by faith, he knows it. 
Hold it up to the sun, and out comes the secret 
writing. So God's law is written in your heart. 
Believe this firmly, say it to God, and hold up that 
heart to the light and heat of the Holy Spirit, and 
you will find it true. The law in the heart will mean 
the fervent love of God's commands, with the power 
to obey them. 

27. — Christ appealed to the law. He was come 
to secure its fulfilment. To the young ruler He 
said, "Thou knowest the commandments." He re- 
vealed the new law of love. An unforgiving spirit, 
unloving thoughts and sharp words, the neglect to 
do good, is all so much disobedience. He spoke 
much of self-denial. Self is the root of all lack of 
love and obedience, the source of all sin. Christ's 
disciple must "deny himself, take up his cross, be- 



184 THE SCHOOL OF OBEDIENCE. 

come the servant of all." Christ claimed for God 
the love of the whole heart. 

28. — How much in ordinary society, how much in 
school-life will not stand the test of strict truth- 
fulness ! 

29. — The consciousness of ignorance lies at the 
root of true teachableness. "The meek will He 
guide in the way." Head knowledge only gives 
human thoughts without power. God by His Spirit 
gives a living knowledge that enters the love of the 
heart, and works effectually. 

30. — The holy day, at the opening of the week, 
is appointed, not that we might have at least one 
day of rest, but that it might fit us to carry God's 
holy presence into all the week and its work. "With 
the first-fruits holy, the whole lump is holy; with 
the root holy, all the branches are holy, too" (Rom. 
xi. 17). 

31. — Obedience to God is such a heavenly art, our 
nature is so utterly strange to it, the path in which 
the Son Himself learned it was so long, that we 
must not wonder if it does not come at once, nor if 
it needs more time at the Master's feet in medita- 
tion, prayer and waiting, in dependence and self- 
sacrifice than the most are ready to give. Jesus 
will teach us to keep His commandments and abide 



THE SCHOOL OF OBEDIENCE. 185 

in His love, even as He kept His Father's com- 
mandments and abides in His love. 

32. — If you ask how the change was effected out 
of the disobedience at the beginning, that closed 
the way to the tree of life, to the obedience at the 
end, that again gained entrance to it, turn to that 
which stands midway between the beginning and 
the end — the Cross of Christ. "Through the obe- 
dience of the One shall the many be made right- 
eous" (Rom. 5:19). "He learned obedience, and 
became the Author of Salvation to them that obey 
Him." (Heb. 5:8-9). He came from heaven to 
learn obedience that he might teach it well. His 
obedience is the treasury out of which, not only the 
debt of our past disobedience is paid, but out of 
which the grace for our present obedience is sup- 
plied. Obedience is the essence of salvation. 

33. — Scripture was not written to increase our 
knowledge but that the man of God may be perfect, 
thoroughly furnished unto all good works. "If any 
man will do, he shall know." If a man's heart is 
given up to do God's will, as far as he knows it, he 
shall know what God has further to teach him. It 
is simply what is true of every scholar with his art, 
of every apprentice with his trade, of every man in 
business — doing is the one condition of surely know- 
ing. 



t86 the school of obedience. 

34. — With only Moses to speak to them, and the 
tables of stone, the whole history of Israel is one of 
disobedience, because they were afraid of direct 
contact with God. Many Christians find it so much 
easier to take their teaching from godly men than 
to wait upon God Himself. Their faith stands in 
the wisdom of men, not in the power of God. Only 
as the Holy Spirit teaches you, only as the Gospel 
is preached to you by man or by book, with the 
Holy Ghost sent down from heaven will it really 
give you, with every command, the strength to 
obey, and work in you, the very thing commanded. 

35. — The expression "obeying the command- 
ments" is very seldom used ; it is almost always, 
obeying Me, or obeying or hearkening to My 
voice. 

36. How often we have asked to abide con- 
tinually in Christ. We have thought of more study 
of the Word, more faith, more prayer; we have 
overlooked the simple truth, "If ye keep My com- 
mandments, ye shall abide in My love." 

yj. — Giving up our will to God is ever the 
measure of His giving His power in us; a sur- 
render to full obedience is nothing but a full faith 
that God will work all in us. 

38. — In Saul we have the most solemn warning 



THE SCHOOL OF OBEDIENCE. 187 

as to the need of exact and entire obedience in a 
man whom God is to trust as ruler of His people. 
Saul is sent against Amalek. God had said, "Utterly 
destroy all." Saul had spared the best sheep for 
the Lord, and Samuel said "To obey is better than 
sacrifice. Because thou hast rejected the word of 
the Lord, He hath rejected thee." Sad type of so 
much obedience, which in part performs God's 
commandment. Let nothing else than obedience to 
the minutest details satisfy you. Lest while we say, 
"I have obeyed," God say, "Thou hast rejected My 
word." 

39. — If you study the Bible without an earnest 
and very definite purpose to obey, you are getting 
hardened in disobedience. Only when you know 
that God is telling yon to do a thing, you feel sure 
He gives the strength to do it. 

40. — Not the text that is easiest and most en- 
couraging brings most blessing, but the text, 
whether easy or difficult, which throws you most 
upon God. 

41. — Do give God time in secret so to reveal 
Himself, that your soul may call the place Peniel — 
"for I have seen Him face to face." 

42. — If the Word does not lead us to wait on 



l88 THE SCHOOL OF OBEDIENCE. 

God, to glorify Him, to receive His grace and 
power for sweetening and sanctifying our lives, it 
becomes a hindrance. 

43. — A soul may grow out of a feeble obedience 
into a fuller one ; but there is no growing out of dis- 
obedience into obedience. A turning away, a decis- 
ion is needed ; and that only comes by definite in- 
sight into wrong, and its confession. The special 
things in which we actually disobey must be found 
out. 

44. — As binding as the first great commandment 
'Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy 
heart" is this last great command too — "The Gospel 
to every creature. " The Church needs to preach, 
in the power of the Holy Ghost, the absolute and 
immediate duty of every child of God, not only to 
take some part in this work, but to give himself to 
Christ to be guided and used as He would have. 

45. — The last great command has been promi- 
nently urged in connection with foreign missions. 
Our Lord's words, "Make disciples of all nations; 
teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I 
commanded you," tell us our aim — to make every 
man a true disciple, in holy obedience to all Christ's 
will. 

46. — Ere He gave His command, and pointed to 



THE SCHOOL OF OBEDIENCE. 189 

the great field of the world, Christ first drew the 
eyes of His servants to Himself on the throne. "All 
power is given Me in heaven and on earth. " Then 
followed "Lo I am with you alway." Christ's power 
in heaven, His presence on earth — between these 
two pillar promises, lies the gate through which the 
church enters to the conquest of the world. 

47. — The vow of entire obedience is the entrance 
fee, for him who would be enrolled by Christ Him- 
self, in the school of obedience. A little child of 
five can be as implicitly obedient as a youth of 
eighteen. The difference between the two lies not 
in the principle, but in the nature of the work de- 
manded. Though externally Christ's obedience 
unto death came at the end of His life, the spirit of 
His obedience was the same from the beginning. 
Whole-hearted obedience is not the end, but the 
beginning of our school life. The end is fitness for 
God's service. A heart yielded to God in unreserved 
obedience is the one condition of progress in 
Christ's school. 

48. — Let your closet be the class-room, your 
morning watch the study hour in which your rela- 
tion of entire dependence on, and submission to the 
Holy Spirit's teaching is proved. 

49. — Do not pare down the time limit of the 



I90 THE SCHOOL OF OBEDIENCE. 

morning watch to less than the half-hour — ten min- 
utes from sleep, ten from company or amusement, 
ten from lessons. The watch means the conviction 
(1) that the only way to maintain the surrender to 
Christ and the Holy Spirit, is by meeting God very 
definitely at the commencement of each day ; (2) an 
insight into the folly of attempting to live a heaven- 
ly life without close communion with God ; (3) the 
confession that alone in personal fellowship with 
God, and the delight in His nearness, proof can be 
given that our love responds to His; (4) the faith, 
that if time enough be given for God to lay His 
hands on us, and renew the inflowings of His Spirit, 
our soul may be so closely united to Him, that no 
trials or duties can separate us; (5) a purpose to 
live wholly for God, and by the sacrifice of time 
and ease, prove that we are willing to pay any 
price for the first of all blessings — the presence of 
God for all the day. Such a period awakens the 
feeling: (1) I have a great work to do, and I need 
time for it. (2) It will give your Bible study new 
point, as between the reading you bow for the Holy 
Spirit's hidden working, and wait for some real ap- 
prehension of God's will for you, through the Word. 
(3) It may help you in that habit of definite inter- 
cession of which the Church so surely stands in need. 
In your future life your time may be more limited, 
your Christian earnestness feebler. Now is the ac- 
cepted time; to-day, as the Holy Ghost saith. 



THE SCHOOL OF OBEDIENCE. I9I 

50. — What made the sick, the blind and the 
needy, in the Gospel, so much more ready to be- 
lieve than we are? There can be no strong faith 
without strong desire. Desire is the great motive 
power in the universe. God's desire to save us 
moved Him to send His Son. Desire for salvation 
alone brings a sinner to Christ. Desire for God, 
fellowship w r ith Him and His will, will make the 
promised land attractive. All indeed wish, in a way, 
to be better than they are, but how few really 
"hunger and thirst after righteousness. " 



UNION BIBLE CLASSES. 

REV. D. M. STEARNS, D. D. 



BROOKLYN — Hanson Place Baptist Church. 

Monday, 10.30 A. M. 
NEW YORK — Reformed Church, Fifty-seventh 

Street and Madison Avenue. 2 P. M. 

MORRISTOWN, N. J.— South Street Presbyterian 
Church. Alternate Mondays, 7.45 P. M. 

ORANGE, N. J.— W. C. T. U. Hall. Alternate 
Tuesdays, 10 A. M. 

EASTON, Pa.— Alternate Tuesdays, 3.45 P. M. 

PLAINFIELD, N. J.— Y. M. C. A. Hall. Alter- 
nate Mondays, 7.30 P. M. 

NEWARK, N. J.— Second Presbyterian Church. 
Alternate Tuesdays, 10.30 A. M. 

JERSEY CITY, N. J.— Bergen Reformed Church. 
Alternate Tuesdays, 2.30 P. M. 

PHILADELPHIA, Pa.— S. S. Union Hall. Thurs- 
days, 4.30 P. M. 

WASHINGTON, D. C — Fourth Presbyterian 
Church. Alternate Fridays, 11.30 A. M. 

BALTIMORE, Md.— Church of Redeemer. Alter- 
nate Fridays, 3.30 P. M. 

HARRISBURG, Pa.— Y. M. C. A. Hall. Alternate 
Fridays, 11.45 A. M. 

LANCASTER, Pa.— Moravian Chapel. Alternate 
Fridays, 3.45 P. M. 

GERMANTOWN, Pa. — Church of Atonement. 
Saturdays, 8 P. M. 



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